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NUCLEAR
Britain Receives U.S. Missile Shield Request
Iraq Used Many Suppliers for Nuke Program
Calculating risk
Uranium type is the issue in Iraq
Avoidable Tragedy post-Chernobyl
Lithuania gets added EU aid for nuclear closure
Ex-Iraqi Worker Tells of Fooling the Inspectors
U.N. Hunts for Arms as U.S. Assails Iraq, Dollar Slides
Small Clues to the Big Picture in Baghdad
Japan Says Nuclear Effort in Korea Merits Hard Line
China ships North Korea ingredient for nuclear arms
U.S. dismisses war concerns
U.S. to Begin Deploying Missile Defense System
Bush approves missile defense
Bush Orders Military to Build Limited Missile Defense by 2004
A Look at Missile Threats Against U.S.
Russia says no violations in Iranian nuclear plans
Scare Tactics On the Rise In Ukraine
Ukrainians Demand Reopening of Nuke Plant
Iraq has had last chance, says US
MILITARY
U.N.: Al-Qaeda's Afghan camps operating again
Peace Accord Signed in Congo
Britain denies Iraq war build-up under way
U.S. Commander Visits Chinese Military
Kurds vow: '10,000 men in Baghdad'
Turkey to send troops into northern Iraq if U.S. attacks from north
American intervention in Israel's elections
No Peace in Sight, Israelis Trust in a Wall
Venezuelan army boss issues threat
Venezuela Crisis Lacks Impartial Referee
TURKEY REPORTS DROP IN U.S. COMPENSATION OFFER
NATO, EU ink peacekeeping pact
Pakistan Withdraws Most Fighter Jets
Shelby Urges Creating New Intelligence Service
C.I.A. Chief Prospers From Bond With Bush
PENTAGON White House Plays Down Propaganda by Military
Pentagon Broadcasts Propaganda Over Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Panel warns against 'secret police'
Commission Opposes Terror Role for F.B.I.
LAPD Chief proposes banning most police pursuits
Albright To Testify At Hague Tribunal
Men From Muslim Nations Swamp Immigration Office
French Thwart Possible Chemical Attack
ENERGY AND OTHER
Brazil's new agriculture minister backs ethanol program
Oil Prices Rise Rapidly
RUSSIAN ECOLOGISTS SLAM MOSCOW MAYOR'S PLAN
ENVIRONMENTALISTS PROTEST ITALY
'War on Terror' Infringing Human Rights, UNHCR Says
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Britain Receives U.S. Missile Shield Request
Reuters
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A600-2002Dec17?language=printer
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said Tuesday it had received a request from the United States concerning its planned missile defense shield, but had not yet given a response.
Prime Minister Tony Blair may have to approve the upgrading of early warning systems at Fylingdales in northern England to allow the U.S. program to go ahead.
Blair's official spokesman said Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon would make a full statement later Tuesday.
"It will confirm that we have received a written request from the United States but will not give our response," he told reporters, declining to give further details.
Britain has been preparing the ground for an announcement for some weeks.
Last month, Hoon declared missile defense could strengthen global stability and deter attack by "rogue states."
And last week, a Ministry of Defense discussion paper spelt out how a missile shield might work, its possible deterrence effect, the costs involved and what Britain's input might be.
If the government agrees, and sources say it is highly unlikely they would not, Blair will face serious opposition from within his ruling Labor Party.
Hoon is expected to give Washington an answer in the New Year.
In a first step toward setting up a missile defense umbrella, the U.S. in June unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty which banned such systems.
The move worried U.S. allies and led to protests in the Labor Party, many of whose members are vehemently opposed to closer military links with Washington and argue a missile defense shield could spark a new global arms race.
The system, dubbed "Son of Star Wars" after an initiative pioneered by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, depends on intercepting an incoming missile with another missile.
-------- business
Iraq Used Many Suppliers for Nuke Program
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Nuclear.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Dozens of suppliers, most in Europe, the United States and Japan, provided the components and know-how Saddam Hussein needed to build an atomic bomb, according to Iraq's 1996 accounting of its nuclear program.
The secret declaration, shown to The Associated Press, is virtually identical to the one submitted to U.N. inspectors on Dec. 7, according to U.N. officials. The reports have not been made public to prevent nuclear know-how from falling into the wrong hands and also to protect the names of companies that wittingly or unwittingly supplied Iraq with the means to make nuclear weapons.
U.N. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the only difference between the two reports is that the latest has a 300-page section in Arabic on civilian nuclear programs and a slightly larger typeface that stretches it to 2,100 pages.
That foreign companies helped Iraq has long been known, and some of them have been identified before, but the Iraqi accounting adds up to the most exhaustive list so far of companies involved.
Iraq's report says the equipment was either sold or made by more than 30 German companies, 10 American companies, 11 British companies and a handful of Swiss, Japanese, Italian, French, Swedish and Brazilian firms. It says more than 30 countries supplied its nuclear program.
It details nuclear efforts from the early 1980s to the Gulf War and contains diagrams, plans and test results in uranium enrichment, detonation, implosion testing and warhead construction.
In one chapter, Iraq admits to having a pilot plan in September 1990 -- one month after it invaded Kuwait -- to increase the enrichment of recovered uranium to 93 percent using centrifuges. The process is a complicated extraction and purification method that at full scale requires thousands of connected, high speed centrifuges.
According to Iraq's report, the most detailed accounting of its former nuclear weapons program, it was also pursuing electromagnetic isotope separation as another method to enrich uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic explosion.
The Iraqis had everything they needed to make nuclear weapons, said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington-based think tank on nuclear arms control. ``They weren't missing any components or any knowledge,'' he said in a phone interview. ``It was simply a matter of time.''
Milhollin said that had it not been for the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons by now, thanks to hundreds of suppliers who sold it an impressive array of equipment and expertise, often with their government's approval and without being aware of the ultimate purpose. According to the Iraqi accounting, induction and electron beam furnaces, which could be used in shaping uranium parts for an atomic bomb, came from Consarc Corp. of Rancocas, N.J. The company says the items were never delivered, however.
Newport Corp. of Irvine, Calif., is listed as a supplier of optical fiber, a product with uses ranging from communications to medical equipment. But the company said it doesn't carry the model listed in the declaration.
EEV Inc., based outside New York City, is listed as a supplier of a thyratron, which the company says is used in medical imaging equipment. It could not immediately verify the sale of the item.
Motorola Inc., was listed as the seller of fast photodetectors, but company spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch said she found no record to support the claim. ``A photodetector product is not part of Motorola's current portfolio.''
Most of the sales were legal and often made with the knowledge of governments. In 1985-90, the U.S. Commerce Department, for example, licensed $1.5 billion in sales to Iraq of American technology with potential military uses. Iraq was then getting Western support for its war against Iran, which at the time was regarded as the main threat to stability in the oil-rich Gulf region.
But inspectors have discovered over the years that Iraq often obtained supplies through middlemen or by lying to companies about the products' intended use.
``It was useful in the past and it will be useful in the future to go to companies and ask them questions,'' said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. weapons inspectors. While the Iraqi declaration provides a lot of important information, the companies can often give inspectors insight into the real extent of Iraq's programs.
Since the Gulf War, dozens of companies have either admitted to sales or were prosecuted in Europe for helping arm Iraq. Several no longer exist.
``Revealing company names can discourage other companies from getting involved in deals with countries like Iraq where you don't really know the true end-use of your products,'' said David Albright, an American nuclear expert and a weapons inspector in 1996.
According to Iraq's accounting, the real help came from German experts and companies, in particular H&H Metallform, which sold the Iraqis old designs for centrifuges.
Cooperation with H&H ``was fruitful and it was called upon to render technical assistance and consultations in various activities,'' Iraq wrote in its nuclear declaration.
In 1993, German courts found two H&H employees guilty of violating export law and sentenced them to over two years in prison for working with Iraq.
German companies allegedly involved in other aspects of Iraq's former weapons programs were named in a report Tuesday in the German daily Die Tag. The report also said companies such as DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and Preussag sold items to Iraq which were diverted to the weapons programs.
The companies either declined to comment on the report, or said the deliveries had nothing to do with weapons, such as trucks or auto parts from DaimlerChrysler.
Some of Iraq's nuclear materials were destroyed during previous U.N. inspections, and Iraq is now banned from repurchasing much of it. But reconnaissance photos released by the Bush administration in October indicate the Iraqis have been rebuilding sites previously used for nuclear development. A recent U.S. intelligence report says Iraq may have nuclear weapons by 2010.
Iraq acknowledged to inspectors last month that it was importing aluminum tubes which it said were for conventional weapons. The Bush administration said the tubes could be used to construct centrifuges for uranium enrichment. But nuclear experts differ on whether the tubes are of the proper size and material.
What Iraq still has, however, is the expertise to start again.
Albright said the new evidence, coupled with long-running suspicions ``that Iraq continued its nuclear weapons program even while inspectors were on the ground in the '90s,'' is what makes the latest declaration such a disappointment.
Mohammed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week that the new submission amounts to a rehash of the 1996 report and covers ``material we already had before.''
A line-by-line comparison of the table of contents from the 1996 declaration and the 2002 version which was released last week by the United Nations finds subtle differences, mainly in translation, but not in substance.
Inspectors were not surprised that Iraq resubmitted old reports since Baghdad claims it hasn't been working on weapons of mass destruction since the 1991 Gulf War. A submission of anything new would have contradicted that claim.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press National Writer Matt Crenson, investigative researcher Randy Herschaft and Frankfurt correspondent Melissa Eddy contributed to this report.
On The Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency: www.iaea.org
U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission: www.unmovic.org
-------- depleted uranium
Calculating risk
The University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria received a Defense Department grant to study exposure to depleted uranium
December 17, 2002
By SCOTT HILYARD
Peoria Journal Star
http://www.pjstar.com/news/topnews/g106192a.html
Most of the billions of dollars spent on national defense are not spent on services or products that come out of central Illinois. Home to no Raytheons, Lockheeds or Boeings, the area has no national reputation as a beneficiary of Department of Defense contracts.
But that doesn't mean Peoria is getting shut out.
A local research scientist recently received a nearly $1 million defense department grant to study the effect on humans of a material the military used during the Gulf War - and continues to use - in the production of bombs and tank armor. It's not the $14.7 billion Lockheed Martin received in 2001, but it's good news for Dr. Stephen Lasley and his employer, the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, the recipients of the new grant.
"From a professional standpoint this research is really uncharted territory and that's a real challenge," said Lasley, an associate professor of pharmacology at the school where he has worked since 1986. "And from the school's perspective the capital investment we've received could lead into off-shoots that we hope might fund more of these kinds of studies after the grant period expires."
The grant - $965,931 through 2006 - funds research into the effects of depleted uranium on human physiology; depleted uranium being the heavy metal that is left over after highly radioactive uranium is removed to be used for nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel. It is about 40 percent less radioactive than just plain uranium - and considered less dangerous to humans because of that - but the complete health risks of exposure are not yet known. That's what Lasley and three lab assistants are studying with the government's money.
One health risk that is known about depleted uranium is that it's a highly-effective people-killer when used in bombs. Because it is exceedingly heavy, the depleted uranium is used in tank armor and in the production of armor-piercing munitions. Only a handful of Western countries, the United States and Britain among them, use depleted uranium in its weaponry, Lasley said.
During the Gulf War of 1991, American soldiers were exposed to depleted uranium (DU) in several different manners. There were those who handled munitions made of the material, those who inhaled smoke containing DU particles while entering or salvaging vehicles or bunkers that were hit with DU projectiles, and those victims of accidental friendly fire who left the Middle East with DU shrapnel embedded in their bodies.
According to the defense department's Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses a total of 320 tons of DU projectiles were fired by the United States during the Gulf War. And:
"DU friendly fire and accidental fire incidents contaminated a total of 31 U.S. combatants in the Gulf during 1990-1991. The incidents, and the resulting cleanup and recovery operations, exposed a number of soldiers to depleted uranium. Those with the highest exposures were in, on, or near vehicles which were struck," the office reported.
Lasley and his research team are using rats to study the effect of DU exposure. His study is two-fold: In one area he mixes DU samples with rat brain tissue. He is also embedding a millimeter-long wire-like sample of DU in the legs of rats to determine if shrapnel-like exposure has long-term health consequences. The research is too new to have led to any reportable results, Lasley said.
"We're looking into how much of the depleted uranium gets into the brain from muscle sites," Lasley said.
The military is interested in the study because it doesn't want to lose DU as munitions material.
"It's nasty stuff," Lasley said, "but valuable from a military perspective."
The biggest value is in its ability to pierce metal. When missiles made with DU strike a metal object, the impact actually sharpens the tip instead of flattening it.
Lasley said working with Department of Defense has been far different than his more typical experience working with the National Institutes of Health.
"The grant process is far less open than what I'm used to and that's made it a little difficult to adjust to," he said.
He expects to report initial findings by next summer.
----
Uranium type is the issue in Iraq
Dec. 17, 2002
Arizona Republic
http://www.arizonarepublic.com/opinions/articles/1217tuelet172.html
I have to take exception to the letter Friday by Richard Scott of Scottsdale ("Radioactivity is not evidence").
Scott states that because of depleted uranium from U.S. armor-piercing weapons used in Iraq during the Gulf War, "detection of radioactive material can lead us to no conclusion about Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons or programs."
This conclusion is completely erroneous and shows a total lack of understanding of the technical issues involved in determining the presence of nuclear weapons or associated programs.
It is not depleted uranium that is at issue here, but rather enriched uranium and the level of enrichment of the uranium. The isotope U-235 is the fissile material used in nuclear weapons, not U-238.
Depleted uranium, as the name implies, is depleted in the U-235 isotope to below that concentration found in naturally occurring uranium ores. Depleted uranium thus is greater than 99 percent U-238. Since U-238 is not fissile, it cannot be used in nuclear weapons. The determination as to whether uranium is either enriched or depleted in U-235 is routinely performed using a technique called mass spectrometry. I can assure Scott and Arizona Republic readers, that "the lab in Austria" is quite capable of making this determination.
Robert G. Behrens Tucson The writer is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
----
Avoidable Tragedy post-Chernobyl
A Critical Analysis
Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., G.N.S.H.
President Emerita of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health
Member of the Board of Regents, International Association of Humanitarian Medicine
Journal of Humanitarian Medicine, Vol. II, No. 3, pp 21 - 28.
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002
From: "robert james parsons" <rjparsons@hotmail.com>
http://www.iicph.org/docs/bertell_on_Chernobyl.htm
Introduction:
Journalists and mathematicians have a way of focussing on one aspect of a complex situation in order to give a snapshot view of its magnitude. For example, one might read in the newspaper that a "six alarm fire" had occurred in some neighbourhood. This immediately conjures up the image of a very large fire requiring six fire stations to send trucks to the scene. It gives one no clue as to the magnitude of loss of life or property, the water or smoke damage, the impact on human lives and health, ecological impact, etc. Another example is that of a television show rating scale. If you see an estimate of five million viewers of some special event television, you immediately understand that this is a "rounded number" meant for comparison only, and which does not reveal how many people actually watched the show. Certainly some televisions played to an empty room and some to a large number of people watching the display in the local pub .It gives no indication of whether the watchers reacted positively or negatively to the programme. If the event is important, we expect professionals to fill in the details later.
Another misleading human custom is presenting an event as "small" when there exist more traumatic forms of the event. For example, the radiation exposure to depleted uranium in the Gulf War is presented as "small" in the face of a nuclear holocaust. Such exposure is not "small" for the victims.
Unfortunately, many government officials, physicists, engineers have used this tactic to deliberately minimize the health effects of radiation, and, in particular the immense suffering after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. For example, some people actually believe that the magnitude of a nuclear accident can be gauged by the potential number of cancer deaths it will cause, and further, that cancer death is the only consequence! Minimalist reporting occurred after the Three Mile Island accident, downwind of nuclear weapon testing, and at serious military accidents like the one which spread plutonium in farm land in Spain. Most recently it has attempted to deny that exposure to depleted uranium weapons has caused severe health damage to the military veterans and the civilians in Iraq, Kosovo and most likely, in Afghanistan.
The minimalist reporting went even further with Chernobyl. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation) recent statement that "only 32 deaths occurred, 200 were heavily irradiated and 2000 avoidable thyroid cancers" resulted from the Chernobyl disaster goes well beyond a mathematical short hand which gives immediate sketch about a disaster. This fifteen-year-later report about a complex painful situation should be much more precise and believable! It rather tries to obliterate from peoples minds and concerns the suffering of millions of persons in rural and un-evacuated areas who were exposed, and hundreds of thousands evacuated but not medically examined victims. When one probes a little more deeply, one finds that the honest scientists and physicians, trying to explain the widespread injuries and long term effects of nuclear exposure have been silenced.
In fact immediately after the disaster of April 26, 1986, due to IAEA policy, unless a person had been declared "overexposed" at the medical tent set up for the "liquidators" of the disaster, he or she was officially considered to be a "radio-phobia" case, a purely psychological phenomenon. Local physicians told people that there would be no medical effects of exposure, until, perhaps in ten or twenty years they may happened to develop cancer. But, not to worry! These future radio-genic cancers would be indistinguishable from "natural" cancers. The physicians soon learned from direct evidence of pathological injuries that this information from the physicists was less than candid. It was not surprising to learn that those who tried to minimize the disaster were the same people charged with promoting nuclear industries, for example, marketing nuclear reactors to the developing nations.
The experience of Chernobyl is not unique, but follows the secrecy pattern used at many lesser accidents which were mishandled in the same way. This has occurred both in the developed and developing world. In particular, I would note the radioactive pollution of the Mitsubishi Asian Rare Earth facility in Bukit Merah, Malaysia, the radioactive waste dumped in Nigeria and the contaminated food distributed to Egypt, Papua New Guinea, India and other countries during the Chernobyl disaster clean up.
However, the health problems due to Chernobyl continue to be very acute right now, and demand international attention and action. Scientists and physicians are deprived of their freedom, and the people, especially the children, are suffering. This crisis can serve to point out the serious secrecy, vested interest and collusion of international agencies protecting nuclear technologies. The public face of the nuclear industry has been "clean and safe". It is important to unmask this public face, serving as a warning to economically developing countries deciding on energy technologies and bringing needed humanitarian aid to the victims. Preserving the false image of nuclear technology keeps the industry and nuclear agencies in business.
Lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Unlike the general study of toxic materials, handled by Toxicologists, the field of radiation and health has been dominated by physicists, engineers and mathematicians since the dawn of the nuclear era in 1943. Their health related communications differ radically in content from similar communications of health professionals in Toxicology, Occupational or Public Health.
This field of radiation health was, with a few exceptions, taken over by the physicists of the Manhattan Project after World War II, in their effort to contain the secrets of the nuclear age. Radiation was an effect of the atomic bomb. Secrecy caused these "hard scientists" to fail to consider the broad range of responses and varieties of vulnerabilities possessed by a living population exposed to this hazard. Such variation in biological responses would have been expected by health professionals..
Because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most people now know about acute radiation exposure syndrome, with vomiting, hair falling out, alterations in blood cells, etc., and this bit of information has been translated into a naive belief on the part of the public, that unless acute radiation sickness has been documented (often by the government physicists) any subsequent severe illness observed in radiation exposed persons is due to something, anything, but not radiation exposure. This has some historical validity, but at Chernobyl with millions of exposed persons in rural un-evacuated areas, hundreds of thousands evacuated but not medically examined, and with the population's continuous ingestion of contaminated foods for the past fifteen years, demanding documentation of radiation sickness is ridiculous. Even in the Japanese cities radiation sickness went undocumented for many victims. Radiation injury is not predicated on documentation of acute radiation sickness, but rather on the alteration of a cell leading to a fatal cancer. It is well documented the these cellular level events can occur well below the level of exposure which causes overt sickness. The amount of energy released by just one nuclear transformation of one atom of a radioactive material is measured in thousands or millions of electron volts. It requires only 6 to 10 electron volts to break the molecular bounds in the cellular DNA and RNA which carry the genes for life.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), exposure and subsequent health records were not complete. The research stations did not begin to select a study population until after the 1950 Japanese census identified survivors and a 1967 dose estimate was derived by the scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S.. Deaths prior to 1950 were ignored. Death certificates, which were at times incomplete, were used to determine first cause of death of the study population. Cancers which were not fatal were not reported until 1994. Most survivors are still alive so their "cause of death" has not yet been studied. Other non-cancer health problems were considered to be "not of concern" and have not been systematically reported.
There were persons who entered the contaminated territories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the fire died down, or who consumed radioactive contaminated food and water, who experienced radiation sickness, but were not officially recognized as "exposed". They are in the radiation exposure control group. This is easily explained to the mathematician, who is told that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies looked for the effects of the immediate penetrating radiation from the exploding bomb on the persons who were within three kilometres of the hypocenter at that moment. For the military person looking for information on the health effects of radiation due to the bomb, this artificial limitation made some sense. However, if a civil society is seeking information on the effects of man-made radiation on the human body, then all sources of that man-made radiation, including that from nuclear fall-out, food and water contamination, residual radioactive debris at the bomb site, etc., is important. Changing the definition of "exposed to man-made radiation" to mean "exposed to the bomb", and then using this research to back public and occupational health policy is problematic to say the least!
Because of this concentration on the first flash of the atomic bomb, serious mistakes have been made by the radiation physicists in estimating the biological damage done by ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, many of which remain in the body for a long time and even enter into biochemical reactions of the cell's genetic material.
It is this atomic bomb study which appears to be dictating much of the inappropriate behaviour of officials with respect to the medical treatment of survivors of Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents. It has also caused harsh treatment of the honest scientists and physicians who spoke directly for the needs of the exposed suffering people. Many of these scientists and physicians, now in prison or effectively silenced, have conducted well designed and executed scientific studies.
Due to the complications generated by the study of external irradiation by a bomb being used to evaluate civilian exposures to inhaled or ingested radioactivity, and the use of this research to educate young physicists and nuclear engineers, many scientific blunders and administrative problems were generated. The failure to deal with the whole breadth of radiation problems became entrenched in the very agencies which were created in the 1950's to protect the public at risk from atmospheric nuclear testing. I will try to unravel the problems with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), the U. S. National Academy of Science Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation Committee (BEIR) and the World Health Organization(WHO). All of these organizations, except WHO, which was relegated to treating the victims rather than understanding the problem, play key parts with respect to current radiation and public health policies and understandings. Ironically, the World Health Organization, created by the United Nations in 1948, was not given any role in the health assessment of this global threat to human and ecological health.
United Nations Initiatives:
Nuclear bombs were first used in war in 1945, when the U. S. used them against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As early as 1946, the U. S. began atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. The former Soviet Union demonstrated that it had the nuclear bomb in 1949, and there was tangible fear of a nuclear exchange during the Korean War. The U.K. began nuclear weapon testing off the coast of Australia in the 1950s, and then on the continent itself and in the Pacific Islands.
The first atomic bombs were based on fission, and because of this they were limited in their destructive power. The force of the explosion blew apart the fissioning materials, terminating the explosive energy release. In 1954 the U. S. tested a thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb), called Bravo, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, demonstrating that a nuclear device with unlimited power could be built. This one was about one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It was this military accomplishment which prompted the "Peaceful Atom" speech of President Dwight Eisenhower before the United Nations in 1954.
The speech followed a shift in U. S. Military Policy to dependence on nuclear bombs and a rush toward production of uranium and the technology necessary to carry this out a major weapon replacement programme: uranium mining and milling, uranium processing facilities, nuclear fuel fabrication facilities, nuclear production reactors, reprocessing facilities and the hazardous transportation and waste associated with each of these industries. In order to obtain American and global cooperation during peace time, there was a perceived need for commercial or so called "peaceful uses" of nuclear technologies which would justify everyone's cooperation in the nation and the international community. Nuclear electrical production was billed as capable of fulfilling all of the energy needs of the developing world, and being "too cheap to meter". It was promoted as the hope of preventing future wars since no country would be in need!
The United Nations responded by creating in 1955, UNSCEAR (Res 913(X) 1955) to "assess and report levels and effects of exposure to ionizing radiation". According to the UNSCEAR website, "governments and organizations throughout the world rely on the Committee's estimates as the scientific basis for evaluating radiation risk, establishing radiation protection and safety standards, and regulating radiation exposure." UNSCEAR was envisioned as an organization of physicists, who at that time were the only ones who could measure radiation since it escapes our senses and requires specialized instruments for detection. They were the experts on the hazard of ionizing radiation, but failed to have the expertise to predict the varied human response to exposure to this hazard. In an odd way, perhaps because of their training in physics, they managed to average all exposures over the entire population of the world, now some six billion people. Natural background, because it is ubiquitous, rather homogeneously exposes everyone. However a localized accident or relatively small work force's exposure, when averaged over the whole population can be made to seem trivial. It is not trivial to those who receive the exposure!
UNSCEAR became primarily a reporting agency, detailing the measurement of radioactive fallout, worker exposures and eventually emissions from nuclear power plants. I would assume that legislators saw this agency as providing independent monitoring of nuclear activities as a check on predicted pollution and theoretical estimates of harm. Unfortunately, UNSCEAR incorporated into its midst those same scientists who were making the predictions and estimating "no harm from low level radiation". No other industry is allowed to monitor itself. We do not ask the tobacco companies to tell us about tobacco's harm, or the pesticide companies to tell us the effects of their products on children. More on this point later.
In 1957, in response to the "Peaceful Atom" speech, the U.N. also established the IAEA, which describes itself as "an independent intergovernmental, science and technology based organization, in the U. N. family, that serves as the global focus point for nuclear cooperation." Its mandates is described as: "to promote peaceful uses of nuclear technology, develop safety standards, and verify that nuclear weapon technology did not spread horizontally to the non-nuclear Nations". They had no mandate with respect to the nuclear weapons of the five nuclear states. Because of their nuclear watch-dog task, IAEA reports directly to the U.N. Security Council.
Response of the World Health Organization:
In 1957, the World Health Organization, which had been founded by the U.N. in 1948, became alarmed about the atmospheric nuclear testing and the proposed expansion of this technology for "peaceful uses". It called together eminent geneticists to consider the threat this exposure would pose to the human and ecological gene pool. Prof. Hermann Muller, the geneticist who received a Nobel Prize for his work on genetic mutations of the fruit fly, using ionizing radiation, in 1944, was a participant at this conference. Although the United States had not sent him as its delegate, he received a standing ovation at the conference for his work, and he consistently opposed extension of nuclear technology into civilian uses. The conclusion of this expert group was that there was not enough information available in the scientific community to assure the integrity of future generations should the burden of ionizing radiation exposure be increased. They called for extreme caution and further genetic investigations, especially in Kerala, India, where there is a high natural background level of radiation, and people have lived in this environment for hundreds of years. These recommendations were never implemented by governments anxious to get on with nuclear activities.
Later an independent NGO in India studied genetic damage in the high radiation background area and found it indeed significantly increased. An Article by B.A.Bridges in Radiation Research (Vol 156, 631-641; 2001) suggests that genetic mutations due to radiation imply that "the nature of the radiation dose response cannot be assumed". There is more complexity than was expected in the health consequences of changed DNA sequences. The serious implications of nuclear pollution for future generations is still an area of research demanding more than ordinary caution.
One can guess at the politics behind a second WHO conference, called later in 1957, of Psychiatrists to consider the Public Health impact of peaceful nuclear activities. These professionals concluded that such activities could cause undo stress to the population because of the association with the atomic bombs. One finds that this has become a mantra for the physicists who have subsequently controlled all information relative to the health impact of nuclear technologies. Most recently, when UNSCEAR released its 15 year assessment of the Chernobyl disaster one of its spokespersons, Dr. Neil Wald, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, stated: "It is important that public misperceptions be reduced as much as possible in this area, because unwarranted perception and fear of harm can itself produce avoidable health problems, as well as erroneous societal benefit vs risk judgements." Loosely translated, Dr. Wald appears to be saying: "if the public gets upset we will not be able to make our money with this nuclear technology".
After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, in response to the people's demand for a health study, the government organized a study headed by a Psychiatrist from the Annapolis Naval Academy. He drew concentric circles around the failed nuclear reactor and compared the cancer rates and also the levels of fear and tension of those living with in these layers. A sensible study would have looked down wind for air borne radionuclide effects, and down stream for the water borne effects. This official study found only fear, which was positively correlated with distance from the plant.
There were about 2000 injury cases from the TMI population taken to court for compensation of health damage due to the radiation exposure. The nuclear company fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court against the courts even hearing these cases, and lost. Then the industry found an old law stating that an expert witness must use the methodology used by other professionals in their field, and using this, the nuclear company managed to disqualify every expert witness (physicians, epidemiologists, botanists, biologists) brought in by the victims. The physicists and engineers claimed sole expertise in the area of radiation health effects. All cases were dismissed by the court without one being heard.
A 1959 Deal Between WHO and IAEA:
This potential conflict between those who wished to exploit the new nuclear technology for both profit and military power, and the custodians of the public health, was superficially resolved by an Agreement (Res. WHA 12-40, 28 May 1959) stating that the IAEA and the WHO recognize that ..."the IAEA has the primary responsibility for encouraging, assisting and coordinating research on, and development and practical applications of atomic energy for peaceful uses throughout the world without prejudice to the right of the WHO to concern itself with promoting, developing, assisting and coordinating international health work, including research, in all its aspects." If the reader is confused, so is the writer. To understand this, one needs to know that the health effects of radiation were classified as secret under the U.S. Atomic Energy Act for national security. The "international health work" assigned to the WHO was taking care of the victims. While technically the IAEA and WHO are "equal" in the U.N. family, those agencies which report directly to the Security Council, as does IAEA, have more status.
In Article I (3) of the WHO/IAEA agreement, it is stated that "Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult with the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual consent". This clause seems to have weakened the WHO from investigating the Chernobyl disaster, and gave the IAEA a green light to bring in physicists and medical radiologists to assess the damage relative to their limited knowledge of the health effects of radiation. (Note: while radiologists use ionizing radiation in their work, they deal with health damage only after the patient receives therapy levels of radiation.) This first evaluation used a different epidemiological protocol in each geographical area and with different age groups, eliminated all concern for cancers as not having sufficient latency periods and failed to note the extraordinary epidemic of thyroid diseases and cancers. From the point of view of Medical Epidemiology they failed miserably to deal with the reality. The director of this 1991 Epidemiological study, Dr. Fred Mettler, is a Medical Radiologist. There were no Epidemiologists, Public Health professionals or Toxicologists on the IAEA Team.
The Self-Established ICRP:
UNSCEAR has continued to be the measurement agency, which verifies that all planned releases of ionizing radiation to the environment, and all exposures of workers, are "acceptable". It fell to the IAEA to "establish or adopt, in collaboration with other competent international bodies, standards of safety for the protection of health and to provide for the application of these standards".
Neither the IAEA nor UNSCEAR turned to the WHO to develop such protective health standards. Instead they both turned to a self-appointed non-governmental organization formed by the physicists of the Manhattan project together with the Medical Radiologists, who had organized themselves in 1928 to protect themselves and their colleagues from the severe consequences of exposure to medical X-ray.. This new organization, called the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection), has a Main Committee of 13 persons who make all decisions. Members of this Main Committee were originally self appointed, and have been perpetuated by being proposed by current members and accepted by the current executive committee. No outside agency can place a member on the ICRP, not even the WHO.
The UNSCEAR 2000 Report was prepared by a Committee including the following seven persons who also serve on the thirteen person Main Committee of ICRP: Prof. Roger Clark (currently the Chair of ICRP), Prof. Rudolf M. Alexakhim, Dr. John D. Boice Jr., Prof. Fred A. Mettler Jr.(the same radiologist who headed the IAEA Chernobyl epidemiological study), Dr. Zi Quiang Pan, and Dr. Yasuhito Sasaki.
It is the ICRP which makes recommendations for the protection of human health for workers and the general public. By their own admission, they are not a public or environmental health organization. They have given themselves the task of recommending a trade-off of predictable health effects of exposure to radiation for the benefits of nuclear activities (including the production and testing of nuclear weapons). Their recommendations were first set in 1957, when the medical radiologists accepted the proposal which had been hammered out by the British, Canadian and American physicists after World War II.
The original recommendation that workers be allowed 15 rad (150 mSv) per year was opposed by the British NRPB and an independent committee called the BEAR (Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation) funded in the U.S. by the Rockefeller Foundation. This forced the ICRP to reduce their recommendation for nuclear workers to 5 rad (50 mSv) per year. Maximum permissible doses for members of the public were ten times lower. This recommendation remained in effect until 1990, when under pressure from more than 700 scientists and physicians, and after a reassignment of doses at the atomic bomb research centres, the worker exposure was reduced to 2 rad (20 mSv) per year, while exposures to the public were reduced by another factor of five to 0.1 rad (1 mSv) per year.
Who Takes Responsibility?
It is important to note that no agency takes responsibility for these recommendations, and the WHO is excluded from professional collaboration or comment on them. ICRP recommends, and the Nations are free to implement or not these recommendations. The Nations generally accept ICRP recommendations claiming that they do not have the expertise or money to derive their own standards. The recommendations are for a risk benefit trade off, and do not pretend to be based solely (or primarily) on protecting the public or worker health.
IAEA states: "The underlying biological basis of the standards over the last several decades has rested primarily on the UNSCEAR. This Committee was originally formed during the period of atmospheric weapon testing to assess the physical processes and health effects of fall out, but has since broadened its remit considerably".
UNSCEAR contains and depends on the leaders of the Main Committee of ICRP. Those who set the standards also judge them to be adequate! Usually scientific theory is tested against reality and rejected if it fails to conform. Radiation health predictions are tested against the reality of the victims, and if reality fails to conform to theory, reality is rejected. The suffering is blamed on some unknown cause!
Another body that also assesses radiation risk is the BEIR Committee of the U.S. National Academy of Science. The BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) Committee was established in the U.S. around 1978 to counter accusations that the Nevada atmospheric nuclear tests had caused the deaths of thousands of American babies. BEIR is essentially a report and interpretation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies of the effects of the atomic bomb, as previously discussed. These atomic bomb studies do not underpin the radiation standards, which actually were established some 17 years before the 1967 dose assessment for atomic bomb survivors on which the atomic bomb studies are based was completed.
IAEA radiation standards for nuclear waste were made "on the basis of recommendations by a number of international bodies, principally ICRP, and estimations of radiation risks made by UNSCEAR . IAEA Safety Requirements for radioactive waste, including standards, codes of practice, regulations, etc., "may be adopted by Member States at their own discretion for use nationally". These IAEA requirements are mandatory only for the IAEA itself.
What happened to the people of Chernobyl?
One can easily imagine that there were civilian victims of radiation sickness in the midst of the chaos during and after the Chernobyl disaster who were never seen at Hospital Six in Moscow! However, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) continues, even in 2002, to insist that only 32 persons died of radiation exposure at Chernobyl! These "counted" deaths were all men from the fire fighting brigade identified as seriously exposed and sick by the heroic physicians and other health personnel at the emergency medical tent near the crippled reactor. This type of counting goes even further than the usual mathematical and journalistic approach - it deliberately and maliciously minimizes the scale of this disaster and leaves the public vulnerable. Those who were exposed suffer without appropriate medical recognition and help, while those at a distance remain unprepared for another, perhaps worse, disaster.
Moreover, since the land contaminated by the failed reactor was poisoned, the fruits and vegetables grown on it, and the domestic animals who feed on it, and their milk and meat, are also contaminated. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have taken this contaminated food and with the advise of the IAEA, have mixed it with un-contaminated food from other parts of the former Soviet Union. This diluted (or adulterated) food has been given to the people to eat, subjecting them to continuous low doses of internal contamination with radionuclides for the last fifteen years. In Belarus, people actually received money from the government for moving back onto the badly contaminated areas and setting up new farms.
The false claims of the IAEA have also failed to rally the international community to help the victims of this disaster. People have not responded internationally, with their characteristic generosity, to the tremendous needs of the people whose heath and lives were cruelly disrupted.
The IAEA and its companion body, UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) have gone even further in the Spring of 2002, by recommending that Chechen and Central Asian refugees re-populate the still contaminated area around the failed reactor. This raises some very serious questions about the mismanagement of information and communication around this serious disaster.
These two UN agencies, namely, IAEA and UNSCEAR (and their partner the ICRP), have apparently supplanted the WHO (World Health Organization) in speaking to the health risks of this nuclear technology, and in particular, to the post-Chernobyl contamination of the people and the land. Whether or not this land is fit for inhabitation, or for food production requires health assessment, not a promotional OK from two agencies which have financial ties to the polluting industry!
The WHO tried to take some initiative on behalf of the suffering people, and in 1996 its Director-General, Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, organized in Geneva an international conference with 700 scientific experts and physicians, many of whom came from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The IAEA, which to its dismay was not invited to jointly sponsor this international conference, nevertheless blocked publication of the proceedings.
The physicians of Chernobyl then organized a conference in Kiev, Ukraine, in June 2001, and invited Dr. Nakajima (who was no longer Director-General of WHO) to be their Honorary President. He was asked about the proceedings of the 1996 WHO Conference about the health of the Chernobyl victims which had never been published. He answered as follows: "I was the Director-General and I was responsible. But it is mainly my legal department... Because the IAEA reports directly to the Security Council of the United Nations. And we, all specialized organizations, report to the Economic and Social Development Council. The organization which reports to the Security Council, - not hierarchically, we are all equal -, but for atomic affairs ... military use ... and peaceful or civil use ... they have the authority".
Because of the internal UN structure, which is grossly out of date, the voice of the physicians and scientists actually dealing with the situation were not heard. It is outrageous to measure the radiation and then present a theory that no one has been hurt! It is imperative to look at the victims and assess their injury. Internationally, the theoretical voice of the ICRP, an NGO, which speaks through the IAEA and UNSCEAR, has prevailed! All three agencies have a vested interest in maintaining the reputation of nuclear industries as "clean and cheap", even if they arn't!
The representative of the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs, D. Zupka, was present at the Kiev Conference, and he shared with participants the view of Kofi Annan, who estimated that the number of victims of Chernobyl is nine million! They are predicting that this number will increase. However, their voice is overpowered by the "scientific" voice of the ICRP speaking through the IAEA and UNSCEAR. This seems incredible, but is the heavy burden which we suffer as a legacy of the nuclear secrecy.
Because of the self-serving theoretical predictions and safety recommendations of the ICRP which colour the expectations of these radiologists, physicists and engineers, even when they are confronted with the reality of the suffering of the Chernobyl victims, these scientists strongly declare that the observed health problems could not be due to the radiation exposure. Health problems are instead assigned to an unidentified factor in the environment or life-style. Hans Blix, Director of the IAEA at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, went so far as to say: "The atomic industry can take catastrophes like Chernobyl every year". There is an obvious conflict of interest for this agency mandated to promote nuclear technologies!
At the Kiev Conference, Alexey Yablokov, President of the Centre for Political Ecology of the Russian Federation, pointed out that the data used by UNSCEAR had been falsified by the State Committee for Statistics, and the officials were arrested in 1999 for this crime. He charged that UNSCEAR continued to use this falsified data to support its minimization of harm.
The medical research of Prof. Y Bandazhevsky, a medical pathologist, Rector of the Medical Institute of Gomel, in Belarus, had to be presented by a colleague, Prof. Michel Fernex. Prof. Bandazhevsky was under house arrest. Belarus received the heaviest fall out from the Chernobyl disaster. After nine years of research in Chernobyl-contaminated territories, he had discovered that cesium 137 incorporated in food, leads to destruction of those vital organs where the cesium 137 concentrates at higher than average body levels. With his wife, a paediatric cardiologist, Bandazhevsky described what he called "cesium cardiomyopathy", and which others say is a syndrome which will eventually be named after him. The cardiac damage becomes irreversible at a certain level and duration of the cesium intoxication. Sudden death may occur at any age, even in children. After publishing this finding, denouncing government non-intervention policy, and arguing against the lack of resources given to the medical investigation of the disaster, Bandazhevsky was arrested, tried and condemned to prison for eight years.
The trial of Prof. Bandazhevsky was observed by lawyers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), from the French Embassy in Minsk, and from Amnesty International. These observers documented irregularities and legal errors from the time of his arrest. In the middle of the night of July 13, 1999, Prof. Bandazhevsky was arrested by a group of police officers, who informed him that the arrest was by presidential decree aimed at fighting terrorism. This was never charged in court. In fact, it was not until four weeks after his arrest, August 1999, that he was finally charged with taking bribes. These proved to be trumped up charges by two defendants who later recanted their testimony saying it was forced under duress and threats. Prof. Bandazhevsky was denied access to a lawyer for the entire duration of his detention, and during the trial there were serious breaches of Belarussian and international Law. Amnesty International has listed Prof. Bandazhevsky as a prisoner of conscience. He is not well, and his important research is being kept from his scientific and medical colleagues.
Professor Bandazhevsky is not alone. The Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian medical community, though silenced in international circles, was still present and active in alleviating the suffering and noting the causes of their people's pain. Many have carried out detailed high quality scientific studies on the genetic, teratogenic and somatic damage done by radiation exposure. They have confirmed their analyses by demonstrating the effects in animal experiments. The rest of the world is being deprived of this research through heavy handed silencing of the scientists by their national authorities, acting on the recommendations of the IAEA and UNSCEAR (and especially ICRP).
Recommendations:
While many individuals have been trying to make known this major U,N, problem, it has been difficult to get this complex situation across to the public in "sound bites". Serious study on the part of the U.N. will be needed to undue all of the damage caused. However, it seems possible to make the following recommendations to the United Nations:
1. WHO should be mandated to review all radiation research and to recommend health based safety regulations. This mandate should be carried out by health professionals, including epidemiologists, oncologists, occupational and public health specialists, geneticists and paediatricians, (not linked with the nuclear industries or nuclear medicine) rather than other scientists.
2. The IAEA mandate to promote "peaceful nuclear technologies" should be withdrawn.
3. The IAEA mandate to safeguard the spread of nuclear weapons should be expanded to include monitoring the reduction and abolition of all nuclear weapons in the nuclear nations.
4. The UNSCEAR mandate needs to include the monitoring of increasing levels of background radiation and nuclear emissions from reactors and nuclear accidents. They should not be entrusted with estimating risk, which is the prerogative of the WHO.
5. Decisions relative to the safety of farm land, food and water ingestion and refugee relocation should be entrusted to WHO.
6. Investigation into the imprisonment of scientists and physicians who have spoken out on behalf of the public health relative to radiation exposure should be undertaken by a special raporteur of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
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Lithuania gets added EU aid for nuclear closure
REUTERS LITHUANIA:
December 17, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19087/newsDate/17-Dec-2002/story.htm
VILNIUS - The European Union has offered Lithuania more money to help close its Soviet-era Ignalina nuclear plant under the Phare 2003 programme besides aid that the EU pledged last week when closing accession talks, the former ex-Communist state said on Monday.
"Up to 30 million euros of Phare 2003 support will be allocated in addition to the 285 million euros which the EU has committed for the special Ignalina programme in 2004-2006," the Lithuanian government's Europe Committee said in a statement, quoting a letter from the European Commission.
For the sake of EU entry, Lithuania has pledged to close one of Ignalina's reactors by 2005 and the other in 2009.
The EU considers the facility unsafe as it shares the same design as Ukraine's ill-fated Chernobyl plant.
It has agreed to guarantee in a special protocol to the country's accession treaty that the EU will continue to help finance the decommissioning work also after 2006.
Lithuania estimates the effort will cost more than 3 billion euros over a 30 year period, and so far has set aside 46 million euros of its own and amassed 216 million euros in an international donor fund.
The government said the Phare money was for waste management and storage projects.
In 2001, Ignalina accounted for 77.6 percent of all electricity produced in the ex-Soviet state, making it the world's most nuclear-reliant country.
Lithuania was one of 10 countries to complete EU accession negotiations on Friday, and expects to join the bloc in 2004.
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Ex-Iraqi Worker Tells of Fooling the Inspectors
Current U.N. Team Will Need a 'Defector' if It Wants to Discover the Truth, Exile Says
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64105-2002Dec16?language=printer
LONDON, Dec. 16 -- Ahmed found it odd that he was constructing a giant vat for production of specialized proteins in an unmarked complex of buildings far off the main road south of Baghdad. But he knew enough not to ask too many questions.
In long years of service to the military-industrial ministries of President Saddam Hussein's government, Ahmed had learned not to inquire about the ultimate uses of the projects he worked on, first as a nuclear construction engineer during the 1980s and then on this seemingly innocuous pot.
"This was a regime that got used to hiding things. We didn't need to know, until it became obvious what it was about," he said.
In the case of the vat, Ahmed had his suspicions. He thought it was meant to create biological weapons material. He was apparently right. U.N. inspectors dismantled the equipment in the late 1990s, after a high-level defector tipped them off to its uses. "That's what the inspectors looking around Iraq now will need," he said, "a defector."
The Bush administration is pressing the current U.N. inspection team to ferry scientists out of Iraq for interrogation. Only then, administration officials say, will they get useful information on suspected Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological arms programs. Failure of Hussein to permit scientists and their families to leave would, in the administration's view, constitute a breach of the latest U.N. resolution demanding open access to weapons sites.
Ahmed left Iraq in 1999 and lives in an Arab country. On a visit to London, he discussed his experiences in fooling earlier weapons inspectors, but asked to keep his real name out of print, because of fears for relatives still living in the country -- one reason he is an example of why the Bush administration says an interrogations-abroad program is necessary and why it might not work.
"Even if you take out their wives and kids, they have other relatives in Iraq -- brothers, cousins, mothers, fathers. Saddam can have them all killed," he said. "You would have to be able to provide the scientist and everyone else full security. They would have to believe that Saddam could not get his hands on them.
"Also, the scientists may not have anything to say. There is no new science in Iraq. The programs, if any, are in the hands of security people. Take me. I could say what I worked on, but I could not tell you the state of any program that went on after I stopped working. Only a few people have that kind of information, and they are well hidden."
Ahmed said he believes that the Iraqi government is continuing to develop biological and chemical weapons and also has become more adept at hiding the programs. "They have had lots of practice," he said.
Ahmed is no repentant defector. He proudly recounted his career in building nuclear facilities for Iraq's efforts to produce an atom bomb. "I felt that as an Arab, it was right that an Arab country have the bomb," he said. "Israel has one. So should we." He felt this way even though he said two of his cousins were executed by Hussein's security forces during the early 1980s for anti-government activities.
For all his pride, Ahmed was not fully trusted by his Iraqi overseers. No one was, he said. At first, he was told that his work was leading the way for nuclear-generated electric power. But eventually his bosses revealed the real goal.
In any case, after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the nuclear arms project stopped, he said. U.N. inspectors came. Hiding the large infrastructure necessary to produce weapons-grade material was impossible.
Nonetheless, his supervisors warned Ahmed and his colleagues to "say little and answer only as narrowly as possible -- the specifics of our particular job, not what we knew about the whole program," he said. "We also had to sign a paper swearing that we had no documents in our private possession. If someone found out otherwise, they said we would be killed."
Ahmed said that he and other nuclear workers were given other jobs throughout Iraq, and eventually he landed at the Military Industrial Commission, which is responsible for constructing weapons factories and military installations. In 1995, he said he was ordered to help construct laboratories and vats at a place called Al Hakam, southwest of Baghdad.
U.N. inspectors were still looking for weapons programs, and they interviewed Ahmed three times, he said. "Each worker simply gave a narrow account of his job. In my case, I was just building a vat," he said.
Colleagues at other places told him they were ordered to bury equipment or to move it around on large trucks, sometimes for days at a time. "It was a giant chess game in which sometimes the pieces went underground," he said.
At Al Hakam, Ahmed said he asked his supervisor what the vats would be used for. Fermentation, he was told. When he asked what ingredient would be converted into what product, he was met with "aggressive silence." The Al Hakam facility was discovered only because of information provided by Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, a son-in-law of Hussein who defected to Jordan in the mid-1990s and conveyed information about the Iraqi biological weapons program.
Ahmed never knew whether the plant had produced a germ. All the time he was at Al Hakam, production was delayed by problems in procuring proper pumps and other equipment, he said.
He left in 1997 and applied to emigrate. The government, fearful of defectors, forced him to stay in Iraq for two more years. In that time, officials surmised, he would lose contact with the programs he worked on and have nothing to offer investigators abroad. "I was very careful to cut off all ties with my former work," he said. "I wanted to leave. I stayed completely isolated. I didn't want to know anything."
Although he has been out of Iraq almost three years, he keeps a low profile. "Who knows? Saddam might think I know something I don't and try to eliminate me," he said. "I will never feel safe."
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U.N. Hunts for Arms as U.S. Assails Iraq, Dollar Slides
Reuters
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
By Huda Majeed Saleh and Randall Mikkelsen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A575-2002Dec17?language=printer
BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.N. inspectors fanned out across Iraq on Tuesday to search for banned weapons after Washington found fault with an Iraqi arms disclosure and vowed to give Baghdad no second chances.
Iraqi officials said nuclear, biological and chemical experts set out at dawn from Baghdad for Mosul, nearly 250 miles north, and Radwan, in the Abu Ghuraib area, about nine miles west.
The United States and its ally Britain have signaled they are ready for war if Iraq breaches a tough U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at ensuring it has no weapons of mass destruction.
The inspectors have so far reported nothing untoward since they returned to Iraq last month after a four-year absence.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday that Washington would this week deliver its final verdict on the disclosures in documents that Iraq handed over to the United Nations on Dec. 7.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Monday that Baghdad would get no second chance. Iraq denies having weapons of mass destruction and experts have been comparing the dossier with previous intelligence.
British officials were quoted as saying they were "very disappointed" by Baghdad's 12,000-page dossier. U.N. officials have said Iraq's declaration failed to account for all of its chemical and biological agents.
"We said at the very beginning that we approached it with skepticism and the information I have received so far is that that skepticism is well founded," Powell told a news conference. "There are problems with the declaration."
Powell did not elaborate, and it was unclear what steps Washington would take after delivering its verdict.
On Tuesday, the German newspaper Tageszeitung said the dossier showed the 80 German firms and institutes contributing to the Iraqi weapons programs since 1975 represented more than the combined total of all firms from other countries.
It said the United States was a distant second with about two dozen companies listed in the Iraqi documents.
VERDICT TOWARD "END OF WEEK"
A U.N. Security Council resolution adopted last month gave Iraq a last chance to come clean on its weapons programs or face serious consequences -- diplomatic language for war.
"We'll withhold making a final judgment or final statement until we have completed our analysis, completed our discussions with UNMOVIC (the U.N. arms inspectorate) and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and our colleagues on the permanent membership of the Security Council," Powell said.
"Then statements will be forthcoming, I expect, toward the end of the week after (UNMOVIC's Hans) Blix makes his presentation to the Security Council on Thursday."
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said this month the Iraqi declaration on its banned weapons programs would not itself trigger a U.S. decision to go to war.
But at the White House, Fleischer said: "I think it was abundantly plain from the will of the United Nations -- this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate, complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possessed."
Britain's newspaper the Sun said on Tuesday the Defense Ministry had begun a build-up for war by issuing Urgent Operational Requirement notices to makers of defense equipment and hiring cargo ships to take equipment to the Gulf.
"It is purely speculative. As the defense secretary, the prime minister and the foreign secretary have been saying for weeks, military action is neither imminent nor inevitable and diplomatic routes are still being pursued," a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters.
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Small Clues to the Big Picture in Baghdad
U.N. Inspections Run Gamut, From Top Secret to Seemingly Mundane
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64225-2002Dec16?language=printer
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq -- U.N. inspectors, wearing baby-blue baseball caps and armbands, were roaming through a missile factory the other day when they came across a room with a couple of ominous warning signs posted outside: "Caution," the signs said. "Risk of Ionizing Radiation."
What's in there? the inspectors asked.
Just an X-ray machine, the plant director answered.
Show us, they said.
So, as the plant director recalled, he escorted the team into the room and put some metal into the machine. Out came the film familiar to anyone who has been X-rayed, he said.
In the three weeks they have been scouring Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, U.N. arms experts have been poking and prodding everywhere they can, testing seemingly innocent explanations, rifling through files, taking soil and water samples, measuring the air for radiation. At a distillery suspected of developing biological weapons, they smelled the alcohol. At a missile factory, they had a rocket test-fired to make sure it did not exceed range restrictions.
The inspectors in Iraq, whose ranks increased over the weekend to 105, have accelerated their schedule to full speed and now fan out early each morning to facilities throughout the Baghdad area and beyond, from a cement factory to a pesticide store, from the most secretive of military bases to government research centers. They visited 13 sites yesterday, their busiest day yet, as they worked to collect and collate information to report to the U.N. Security Council on the status of Iraq's banned weapons programs.
So far, the inspectors have disclosed few findings and drawn no conclusions. That is the work of higher-ups at U.N. headquarters in New York, where diplomats are keenly aware that the outcome of the searches could bring a decision by the Bush administration on whether to wage war on Iraq.
"It will take us some time to come up with a bigger picture," said Hiro Ueki, Baghdad spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC.
But as they settle into a routine, the inspectors have begun focusing more attention on a handful of the most critical facilities. Nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, for instance, have learned the route to the town of Tuwaitha all too well. About 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, it is home to the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, the heart of Iraq's nuclear program.
Iraq has said it halted its nuclear weapons development program a decade ago. Inspectors have combed through the sprawling Tuwaitha facility six times so far to inventory nuclear materials, most recently on Sunday when they took samples of water and silt.
Inspectors have also spent considerable time at the Qaqaa complex not far from Tuwaitha, where they have searched for indications of nuclear or chemical weapons. They first showed up there on Nov. 30 to remove an air sampler, and then returned five more times, including yesterday, to examine an explosives production plant and a sulfuric acid plant.
More and more, inspectors are choosing to return to facilities they had already inspected. Most of the inspections yesterday, for example, were repeat visits.
However, since making a visit to a presidential palace to test their ability to get in, they have not gone to any of the dozens of others, sticking at least for now to more conventional and less provocative locations.
To avoid becoming too predictable, however, the inspectors have tried to maintain the advantage of surprise. Over the weekend, for instance, nuclear specialists showed up after dark at the Muahaweel military base south of Baghdad.
So far, they have encountered none of the intransigence that marked their predecessors' experience in Iraq during the 1990s, which led to their withdrawal in 1998 and a subsequent four-day U.S.-British bombing campaign. Iraqi officials have kept to their word in opening the gates when the U.N. teams arrive. The one time a lone duty officer did not have a key, the inspectors sealed rooms and returned the next day to find no sign of tampering.
Recognizing that demonstrating openness may be the best way to undercut international support for war, Iraqi officials urge foreign journalists to cover the inspections each day instead of turning to another subject.
"The weapons inspections carried out so far have uncovered the lies of Britain and the United States, and Iraq will continue cooperation with the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission to ensure the success of its mission," Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, head of the National Monitoring Directorate, the Iraqi liaison to the United Nations, told the official Al-Iraq newspaper last week.
To test that further, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has asked Iraq to produce a list of scientists associated with its weapons programs by the end of the year, possibly so they can be interviewed outside the country. During an interview on Lebanese television yesterday, Amin reiterated that Iraq would comply.
The inspection process has taken the U.N. experts far and wide. Not long ago, they showed up at the gate of the Al Abraj distillery, which produces about 100 cases of gin, whiskey and arrack a day. About six inspectors toured the factory, 12 miles south of Baghdad, checking out the bottling conveyor belts and the steam cleaners and the storerooms filled with labels, cardboard cartons and jugs of fruit flavors.
Alber Poulus Younan, the plant director, pulled a rubber hose from the machines, let a liquid that was 96 percent alcohol spill over his hand and held it up for the inspectors to smell, as he did again yesterday for a couple of visiting journalists. Whatever else it might be, a look around left no doubt that the Christian-owned Al Abraj produces many bottles of booze.
"It's a factory for drink," Younan said. "They're looking for something special. I don't know what it is."
The answer came in what the inspectors showed most interest in -- the fermenters. Five giant, rusting 40-cubic-yard vats sat in a building with labels that were attached to the vats by other inspectors four years ago. The new inspectors checked the bar codes against their records and moved on.
Fermenters can be critical to the weaponization of such biological pathogens as anthrax. But Younan and the distillery's owner, Shakir Easa, laughed at the notion that their machines produce killer spores. "It's funny, because any simple citizen of the world comes to this place and he can tell it's just an alcohol factory," Easa said.
Another team of inspectors spent nearly three hours last weekend at a missile factory in Abu Ghraib, 25 miles west of Baghdad. The plant director, Hussein Mohammed, told the inspectors that he produces only al-Samoud liquid-propellant rockets that travel less than the 93-mile limit imposed by U.N. sanctions, contrary to assertions by the U.S. government.
With the sound of clanging metal and the odor of industrial cleaning fluid in the air, men in white smocks and women in head scarves stared at the inspectors as they examined the 18 buildings surrounded by a fence topped with concertina wire. Hanging above them in the courtyard was a massive tile portrait of President Saddam Hussein.
Mohammed said he had no warning the inspectors were coming. "Even as they were arriving, I learned they were here," he said. But neither, he added, did he have anything to hide. "We want the inspectors to show that we're not making any such weapons and we hope that the Security Council will take a decision to lift the blockade against the Iraqi people," he said.
-------- korea
DIPLOMACY
Japan Says Nuclear Effort in Korea Merits Hard Line
December 17, 2002
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/international/asia/17DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - The United States won a commitment from Japan today to continue taking a hard line toward North Korea that would bar any bargaining or talk of economic incentives until the government in Pyongyang agreed to shut its nuclear weapons program.
Taking a break from their meeting at the State Department with Japan's senior Defense and Foreign Ministry officials, both Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz repeated the administration's policy of last week, that it was up to North Korea to ease tensions in the region.
The American and Japanese comments amounted to the latest rebuff to appeals by North Korea for negotiation on the nuclear issue. Today North Korea again called for a nonaggression treaty with the United States, saying it was the only way to prevent war on the Korean Peninsula. Secretary Powell dismissed the plea.
In reiterating its call for a treaty with the United States, political experts say, North Korea could be seeking to influence the outcome of South Korea's presidential election, which takes place on Thursday.
South Korean news reports are saying the race has become too close to call. The governing party candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, has urged continued aid and engagement with North Korea, in line with the so-called sunshine policy of his mentor, President Kim Dae Jung, who is barred by law from seeking a second term. Although the publication of polls is banned in the final phase of the campaign, it has been widely reported that Mr. Roh's narrow lead has shrunk in the wake of the perceived North Korean belligerence.
Mr. Roh's main opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, of the conservative Grand National Party, has sought to soothe concerns that his approach toward North Korea would be dangerously confrontational. The 67-year-old Mr. Lee said of Mr. Roh, "The future of the Korean Peninsula will be perilous if we elect as president the candidate who is the inheritor of the failed sunshine policy and who will continue sending cash aid to North Korea despite its nuclear arms development."
As for Japan, it has officially declared agreement with President Bush on the approach to North Korea, but many voices of dissent exist within and outside the Japanese government. Some Japanese, and also some South Koreans, fear that a confrontation could backfire and deepen the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs.
All talk of differences between the United States and Japan were dismissed today. Asked about the differences between the countries, Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi rejected the premise of the question. "Actually, between our two governments, there is no difference - no fundamental difference of position, absolutely none," Ms. Kawaguchi said.
Secretary Powell smiled and added: "I agree completely with my colleague. Our positions are identical."
But there have been clear disagreements since October, when it was first disclosed that North Korea was embarking on a nuclear weapons program, despite promises it made in a 1994 accord with the United States and other countries in the region.
At first, for example, Japan joined with South Korea, Russia and China in quietly arguing that it would be better to continue economic assistance to North Korea while resolving the nuclear crisis.
American allies in the region, too, are said to lean toward upholding another part of the 1994 accord - helping North Korea build two light-water nuclear reactors that could supply some of its energy needs without a risk that they could be converted to nuclear weapons production.
The United States wants to cut off all such aid, except for food assistance to civilians, to protest North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Asian diplomats say the next pivotal moment on North Korea will come after presidential elections in South Korea on Thursday.
Some in the Bush administration say that, without taking sides, they hope Mr. Lee, the hawk, will win the election.
By the same token, they want to encourage the Japanese to stand up to North Korea and not give in to its demands for more economic benefits in return for halting its weapons program.
The Japanese minister of state for defense, Shigeru Ishiba, was also at the meeting in Washington today.
He and Ms. Kawaguchi said they also favored proceeding on a program to develop a missile defense system that would shield Japan and other countries from missile attacks from North Korea or other countries.
They also said they supported United States policy on Iraq, particularly on returning to the United Nations Security Council if the inspections imposed by the Council are rebuffed by Baghdad.
Secretary Powell declined to speculate on how Japan might help in any military effort against Iraq. In the past, Japan has shied from participation in direct military action. But in the Persian Gulf war, in 1991, Japan contributed several billion dollars to the war effort waged by the United States and its allies.
Japan has continuously asserted that its postwar Constitution, written by Americans during the occupation, bars the use of its armed forces in anything but direct self-defense.
"We are in the closest coordination," Secretary Powell said, "and it is up to the government of Japan, the people of Japan, to determine how they might respond in the face of a mandate from the international community to do something about Iraq's lack of cooperation."
----
China ships North Korea ingredient for nuclear arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021217-407202.htm
North Korea has purchased a large shipment of chemicals from China that can be used to make nuclear-weapons fuel, U.S. intelligence officials say.
North Korean procurement agents succeeded in buying 20 tons of tributyl phosphate, known as TBP, a key chemical used to extract material for nuclear bombs from spent nuclear fuel, said officials familiar with intelligence reports of the transfer.
The officials said the chemical also can be used in commercial processes, such as making plastics, ink and paint.
U.S. intelligence agencies, however, believe North Korea will use the TBP for its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program, based on sensitive intelligence information, the officials said.
The chemical is used in a process known as plutonium-uranium extraction, or purex, which produces plutonium from spent reactor fuel.
North Korea announced last week that it planned to restart its plutonium reactors at Yongbyon.
"The fact that North Korea is importing tributyl phosphate right now is rather ominous," said Gary Milhollin, director of the private Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "It's evidence that North Korea plans to extract more plutonium."
The chemical also can be used to prepare uranium for the weapons process, Mr. Milhollin said in an interview.
North Korea has a large supply of spent reactor fuel that is under international surveillance. The reprocessing of the spent fuel means Pyongyang could produce more bombs "in fairly short order, a matter of months," he said.
The TBP transfer, which happened earlier this month, highlights the Chinese government's failure to control the export of goods related to nuclear-weapons production.
The disclosure of the transfer also followed appeals from senior Bush administration officials in recent months for Beijing's help in halting North Korea's nuclear-weapons program.
The transfer itself is an indication that China's government, contrary to some public statements, is unwilling to support U.S. efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem, said administration security officials.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a summit in Beijing this month that both favored a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
Mr. Jiang also said during an October meeting with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, that China favored a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but stopped short of condemning Pyongyang's nuclear program.
The two presidents agreed at the summit to discuss curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
However, senior administration officials said China continues to export nuclear, chemical and biological weapons material and missile goods, despite claims of curbing exports by Chinese companies to rogue states or unstable regions.
White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told a visiting Chinese general last week that Beijing's help in stopping the North Korean nuclear program would be important to U.S.-China relations.
North Korea's government revealed to a State Department official in October that it was secretly developing uranium-enrichment capability to make fuel for nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang then announced it planned to restart three reactors at the Yongbyon nuclear complex that were shut down under a 1994 agreement.
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters yesterday that he did not believe China was helping North Korea's nuclear program and that Beijing was being helpful in U.S. efforts to curb North Korea's drive for nuclear arms.
"China is working with the United States to make certain that we can resolve the situation with North Korea peacefully and diplomatically, and that is being done in concert with South Korea, and Japan and Russia, as well," Mr. Fleischer said.
A White House spokesman had no comment on the Chinese-North Korean chemical transfer.
The TBP purchase is expected to lead to sanctions on the Chinese and North Korean companies involved in the sale. U.S. officials said the company was located in Dalian, a Chinese seaport, but they did not name the company.
U.S. intelligence officials first disclosed North Korea's effort to purchase tributyl phosphate in China to The Washington Times earlier this month.
Henry Sokolski, head of the private Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said the transfer of the nuclear arms-related chemical shows the Chinese "don't understand how important this is to us."
"If China thinks this is a good way to restrain North Korean nuclear activities, they need to talk to us," Mr. Sokolski said.
----
U.S. dismisses war concerns
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021217-273132.htm
The United States yesterday dismissed North Korean assertions that the Korean peninsula was on the verge of war, saying that if such concerns existed, they could result only from Pyongyang's behavior.
Although the Bush administration will not resume bilateral contacts until the North dismantles its nuclear-weapons program, it has given Japan a green light to continue its dialogue with the reclusive state.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the situation after Pyongyang's decision last week to restart a nuclear reactor it shut down eight years ago "difficult" and "dangerous."
But, he said, "the United States has no plans to attack North Korea, and I see no indication that North Korea, however concerned it might be, is taking any action that would suggest we are on the verge of war from them attacking South.
"So if there is any concern about a war, that concern has been raised by North Korea's actions," Mr. Powell said after he and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz met with Japan's foreign and defense ministers at the State Department.
The only way to step back from the situation is for North Korea to suspend its uranium-enrichment program, which it first acknowledged in early October, and for the country to reverse its decision to reopen its 5-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon, Mr. Powell said.
"Then we can determine how to move forward with respect to dialogue," he said. "The United States will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed."
But in a joint statement after the meeting with the Japanese ministers, the administration said it "reaffirmed" that the United States "has always been open to dialogue in principle," noting that Japan-North Korea talks that started a few months ago "serve as important channels to resolve security issues."
Asked about that obvious difference between U.S. and Japanese policy, Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said there were "no fundamental differences" between the two countries. She repeated Mr. Powell's warning that Pyongyang must stop its nuclear activities.
The Bush administration, reluctant to undertake significant steps in its dispute with North Korea before South Korea's presidential election Thursday, is urging its allies and other regional powers to step up diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang.
Mr. Powell said the international community, "including Russia, China and the European Union, is united in calling for a denuclearized Korean peninsula." Moscow and Beijing are seen as particularly important because of their influence on Kim Jong-il's regime.
Russia refused to put pressure on North Korea yesterday and said it "will not do so in the future."
"History has shown that pressure on North Korea has pitiful results, rather than solving a problem," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov told the Interfax news agency. "We are not going to unite with anyone to pressure North Korea. This is absolutely ruled out."
The North Korean Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the government was reopening a nuclear-power plant and resuming construction of two reactors to compensate for its recent loss of monthly fuel-oil shipments from the United States.
Last month, the U.S.-led Korean Peninsula Development Organization (KEDO) suspended the annual shipment of 500,000 metric tons of oil to the North.
In addition to the heavy fuel oil, the KEDO was building two light-water reactors in Kumho, in the country's northeast, to compensate Pyongyang for closing the power plant, which was believed to be providing fuel for an atomic-weapons program.
-------- missile defense
U.S. to Begin Deploying Missile Defense System
Reuters
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
By Charles Aldinger
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A875-2002Dec17?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush has ordered the U.S. military to begin deploying a national missile defense system with 10 interceptor rockets at a base in Alaska by 2004, administration officials said on Tuesday.
The decision, which comes despite last week's failure of an anti-missile test over the Pacific Ocean, was expected to be announced by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later in the day, the officials told Reuters.
Defense officials, who asked not to be identified, confirmed a report in The Washington Times that Bush was going ahead with an ambitious schedule to field 10 ground-based interceptors at Fort Greeley, Alaska, by 2004 and an additional 10 interceptors by 2005 or 2006.
Another Bush administration official said the interceptors could also possibly be deployed at Vandenberg Air Force base in California.
"It's the first deployment of the missile defense system," said the administration official, who asked not to be named. "We're talking about deployment in 2004."
Erecting such a shield is the Pentagon's single most expensive development program, likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades.
Last Wednesday, the United States suffered its third failure in eight test attempts to shoot down a long-range dummy warhead in space over the Pacific Ocean, and scientific critics of the multibillion-dollar program have charged it is not yet mature enough to begin deployment.
But Bush and Rumsfeld have stressed the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology have sharply increased the need for such a defense against attack from "rogue states" such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, especially in the wake of devastating attacks on America using hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001.
WITHDREW FROM ABM TREATY
In a first step toward setting up a missile defense umbrella, the United States in June withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that banned such systems.
The decision to begin deploying a national missile defense, which has been criticized by Russia and China, follows North Korea's announcement this month that it will proceed with a controversial program to develop nuclear weapons.
The Fort Greeley site would allow the U.S. military to try and intercept any attack by long-range missiles being developed by the North.
The initial deployment would provide the United States -- which has been examining several ways to shoot down medium- and long-range missiles in flight -- with a limited defense against such attack.
In London, British officials said they had received a written request from the United States concerning its planned missile defense shield but had not yet responded.
Washington wants Britain to upgrade an early warning radar system at Fylingdales in northern England to enhance the program to protect both the United States and allies from attack.
Bush had wanted to put an Alaska-based "test bed" initially with five missile silos -- and rudimentary operational capabilities against real attack -- in place by October 2004.
The test bed was the first leg of a planned layered shield against missile attack. Other Pentagon projects involve overlapping systems that could be based at sea, in space and aboard laser-firing modified Boeing 747 aircraft.
For each of the past two fiscal years alone, Bush requested and the U.S. Congress approved $7.8 billion in research, development and testing funds.
----
Bush approves missile defense
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021217-10394100.htm
President Bush has decided to begin deploying by 2004 a nationwide defense system against ballistic missiles, The Washington Times has learned.
Mr. Bush is expected to announce the decision today, with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other defense officials then describing the details of the deployment plan.
The decision comes a year after the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow more effective research and development of a system to shoot down long-range and short-range missiles. It also fulfills a presidential campaign promise Mr. Bush made in May 2000.
It marks the first time since the 1960s that the U.S. government will field an anti-missile system. President Reagan first announced the major shift toward strategic defenses and away from offensive nuclear missiles in 1983.
Until now, the Pentagon was investigating whether various methods of shooting down incoming missiles were feasible. Based on the past year of work on missile defenses, Mr. Bush decided to go forward with the limited system.
According to a senior administration official, the deployment plan calls for fielding 10 ground-based interceptor missiles at Fort Greeley, Alaska, by 2004 and an additional 10 interceptors by 2005 or 2006.
The system will provide the United States with a limited defense against long-range missile threats, primarily those posed by rogue states. Recent missile tests and U.S. intelligence reports have pinpointed North Korea, Iran and Iraq as the likeliest nations to pose such a threat. The interceptors will be guided to targets by a global network of radars and sensors that will identify and track long-range missiles.
To deal with short-range and medium-range missiles, the Pentagon plans to deploy an updated version of the Navy's Standard Missile-3 on ships equipped with the Aegis battle management system.
American missile-defense plans have been criticized by Russia and China, most recently at a meeting earlier this month between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
The decision comes amid heightened tensions about North Korea, which announced recently that it is considering lifting its moratorium on missile flight tests. Pyongyang surprised U.S. intelligence agencies by flight-testing a long-range Taepo Dong missile in August 1998. North Korea also revealed that it had been secretly developing uranium-based nuclear weapons and would restart nuclear reactors that had been shut under a 1994 agreement.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an Oct. 24 speech that "moving forward on missile defense, particularly by taking advantage of new technological opportunities, is an essential part of a strategy to provide the range of capabilities necessary to defend against the broad spectrum of new threats and challenges that we will confront in the 21st century."
Mr. Wolfowitz said the threat from short-range missiles "is here with us today" and that the threat from long-range missiles "may still be a few years away."
By withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, "we may now be in a position to be able to respond before that threat emerges," he said.
Preparatory construction at the first missile-defense site at Fort Greeley began in June, and other elements of the missile-defense test site will be built beginning in 2003.
In the past year, the Pentagon has begun conducting tests with short-range missile-defense systems that were prohibited by the ABM Treaty and has built and tested mobile and sea-based sensors that detect and track missiles.
"Our missile-defense program since 2001 has demonstrated that missile technology, in particular hit-to-kill technology, actually works," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "We actually can hit a bullet with a bullet."
A recent missile-defense test failed, however, on Dec. 11, when an interceptor rocket did not separate from its booster. Four earlier tests were successful.
Mr. Bush announced on Dec. 13, 2001, that the United States was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.
"I have concluded the ABM Treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks," Mr. Bush said at the time.
Critics said the treaty withdrawal would lead to a new strategic-arms race, although the reaction from Russia and China has not gone beyond verbal criticism.
Mr. Wolfowitz said in his speech that the war against terrorism should not mean that the United States should stop developing missile defenses.
"It is clear that potential adversaries will pursue any means they can to exploit the vulnerabilities of a free society," he said.
"They will exploit the freedom and privacy rights in the West. They will exploit our reluctance to kill innocent civilians in time of war. And they most certainly will seek to exploit our near total vulnerability to ballistic missile and cruise missile attack."
--------
Bush Orders Military to Build Limited Missile Defense by 2004
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Missile-Defense.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Tuesday he will begin deploying a limited system to defend the nation against ballistic missiles by 2004.
Though the first parts of the system will be put into use while more advanced technology is still being developed, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said it will likely stop "a relatively small number of incoming ballistic missiles, which is better than nothing."
As a candidate, Bush promised to build an anti-missile shield, and earlier this year he pulled out of an anti-ballistic missile treaty to advance the plan. Tuesday, he cited the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America as evidence that the country faces "unprecedented threats" and needs the anti-missile shield.
"When I came to office, I made a commitment to transform America's national security strategy and defense capabilities to meet the threats of the 21st century," Bush said in a prepared statement. "Today I am pleased to announce we will take another important step in countering these threats by beginning to field missile defense capabilities to protect the United States as well as our friends and allies."
He called the initial stage "modest," but said, "These capabilities will add to America's security and serve as a starting point for improved and expanded capabilities later as further progress is made in researching and developing missile defense technologies and in light of changes in the threat."
The plan calls for 10 ground-based interceptor missiles at Fort Greely, Alaska, by 2004 and an additional 10 interceptors by 2005 or 2006, defense officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Bush said the "initial capabilities" will also include sea-based interceptors and sensors based on land, at sea and in space.
Asked at a Pentagon press conference how he could be confident in fielding a system considering some recent failures in testing, Rumsfeld said, "most things don't just arrive fully developed."
"The way to think about the missile defense program is that ... it will evolve over time."
Rumsfeld used as an example the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, the spy plane that became a big asset in the war in Afghanistan although it was still in testing. The Predator allowed troops to gather intelligence without endangering pilots and ones fitted with missiles allowed the CIA to carry out attacks without endangering their agents.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, the likely next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lauded the decision to proceed on missile defense and said Congress would likely approve additional money. He said an extra $1.5 billion would likely be needed over the next two years for the program that was budgeted for $7.8 billion in 2003.
"Today, the United States cannot stop a single ballistic missile headed for an American city," said Hunter, R-Calif., who chairs Armed Services subcommittee on military research and development. "The consequences of such an attack would be devastating, and the danger continues to grow as nations such as North Korea, Iraq, and Iran continue to develop, purchase, and sell advanced ballistic missile technologies."
But David Sirota, spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, questioned Bush's priorities.
"If George Bush thinks we are so flush with cash that we can afford billions to deploy a technology that might not even work, then why has he repeatedly rejected funding for basic security like border patrol, Coast Guard and immigration services that we know is desperately needed to prevent another September 11th?" he said.
Bush's announcement came six days after the latest test of the system failed when an interceptor rocket did not separate from its booster rocket and destroy a Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile as planned.
Three of eight tests of the interceptors have been judged failures by the military.
The initial Bush plan is more limited than the Strategic Defense Initiative envisioned by President Reagan in 1983 that came to be known as "Star Wars."
Still, Bush expanded the program significantly from the ground-based plan pursued by President Clinton by also ordering research and testing on sea-based and space-based systems.
The Pentagon has begun conducting tests with short-range missile-defense systems that were prohibited by the ABM Treaty and has built and tested mobile and sea-based sensors to track missiles.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the missile defense timing had nothing to do with North Korea's recent admission that it had a secret program to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons. But, he noted, Bush cited North Korea as a threat when he promised during his campaign to build an anti-missile safety net.
The United States has asked to use a radar complex in northern England as part of a global missile defense shield, the British government said Tuesday. American officials have also asked NATO member Denmark if it can upgrade a radar station at an American Air Force base in Greenland as part of the system.
--------
A Look at Missile Threats Against U.S.
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense-Glance.html
Only Russia and China can strike the continental United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from their territory. Russia has a large force of such missiles, far too many for any limited missile defense system to overcome.
China has a small ICBM force but is expected to increase its arsenal in the coming years, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
Several countries, most notably North Korea, are developing long-range missiles, according to intelligence officials. North Korea is the closest; its Taepo Dong 2 long-range missile may be ready for flight testing.
U.S. officials also fear that North Korea will provide its missile technology to other potentially hostile nations.
Countries with a land-based ICBM force capable of striking targets in the United States:
--Russia: 700 SS-18, SS-19 and SS-25 missiles, carrying 3,000 warheads. Russia is retiring missiles and warheads.
--China: 20 DF-5 missiles, expected to expand three or four times by 2015.
Countries pursuing long-range ballistic missiles:
--North Korea: Developing Taepo Dong II, capable of reaching Alaska, Hawaii, possibly the western United States. Could be ready for flight testing within a short time.
--Iran: May be planning a Shahab-5 ICBM, but U.S. intelligence officials do not believe Iran will be able to test this or another ICBM until around 2010. Foreign assistance, particularly from North Korea, could speed this development.
--Iraq: No specific ICBM programs have been described. U.S. intelligence officials believe Iraq, if left unhindered, could have an ICBM in development by 2015, but some believe even this is unlikely. Foreign assistance could speed this development.
--India: U.S. intelligence officials believe India could convert its space rockets to an ICBM within two years, but there is no information India plans to do so.
Sources: National Intelligence Council, Defense Department.
-------- russia
Russia says no violations in Iranian nuclear plans
REUTERS RUSSIA:
December 17, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19090/newsDate/17-Dec-2002/story.htm
MOSCOW - Russia, which is helping Iran build a nuclear power plant, said on Sunday Tehran was violating no international rules by developing two other nuclear sites despite U.S. fears they could be used for military aims.
Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev was also quoted as telling Itar-Tass news agency in an interview that efforts should be made to persuade North Korea to ease its tough stand on resuming its nuclear programme.
Russia has faced heavy U.S. criticism for helping Iran build a reactor at a nuclear plant at Bushehr but Rumyantsev said Moscow was proceeding with the project. He dismissed as unfounded U.S. suggestions last week that two other facilities under construction could enable Iran to produce nuclear weapons.
He told the agency Iran had never concealed its intention to build a complete nuclear cycle and the facilities "do not violate any commitments" the country had undertaken.
Tehran has denied U.S. assertions that the two sites near the towns of Natanz and Arak were of a type that could be used for making a nuclear weapon. It says it is determined to meet its growing demand for electricity with nuclear power.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the facilities, seen in commercial satellite photographs, had generated "grave concerns". Washington has labelled Iran as part of an "axis of evil" bent on developing weapons of mass destruction.
But Rumyantsev was quoted as saying: "You cannot assume anything from the published photographs."
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had been discussing the sites with Tehran since August, with Iranian authorities agreeing to submit to IAEA monitoring.
Rumyantsev said Russia had no connection with either facility, but predicted that Washington could increase pressure on Moscow to halt its participation in the Bushehr project.
"We have no intention of doing so, as there is no proof that we are committing any violations of any sort," he told Tass.
Rumyantsev's press service told Tass Moscow's continued participation in the Bushehr project was contingent on Iranian assurances that all spent fuel would be returned to Russia - a demand advanced by U.S. experts.
The press service said it was uncertain whether Russia would pursue plans to build up to five more reactors at the site.
On North Korea, which said this week it intended to restart a nuclear reactor shut down under a 1994 deal with the United States, Rumyantsev said attempts should be made to discuss the matter with Pyongyang's secretive leadership.
"North Korea has taken a specific stand, which has to be understood with efforts made to tone it down," he told Tass.
Russia, he said, had ceased all nuclear cooperation with Pyongyang in 1993 and had no intention of reviving it.
"If North Korea decides to seek our help, this is possible only through the IAEA," he told Tass.
-------- ukraine
Scare Tactics On the Rise In Ukraine
Kuchma Government Presses Critics in Legislature, Media
By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64498-2002Dec16?language=printer
KIEV, Ukraine -- Having built a multimillion-dollar enterprise over the last decade by making and selling shingles and tar paper, Volodmyr Shandra knows all there is to know about the business of roofing.
It's in the business of politics -- he is a new member of parliament and a critic of Ukraine's struggling president, Leonid Kuchma -- that the roof has come crashing down around his head.
The 39-year-old businessman was elected to the legislature in April as a member of the Our Ukraine faction, the leading opposition to Kuchma's increasingly autocratic rule. In July, he said, a friend passed along a message from a top official in Kuchma's government: If Shandra did not join the pro-Kuchma lawmakers, his factory would find itself in deep trouble.
Within a month, he said, a cadre of masked officers toting machine guns showed up at the factory in the western Ukraine city of Slavuta. They seized a dozen computers and 3,000 pounds of documents.
The factory was all but paralyzed during the critical summer construction season, he said, wreaking havoc with its clients and dealers. Now it faces a criminal investigation for supposed financial improprieties.
"I never imagined these things could happen," Shandra said.
Muscling legislators is just the most visible of a variety of hardball tactics that critics say have intensified here as Kuchma's government sinks deeper into scandal and loses popular support. Other methods include retaliating against insufficiently loyal businessmen and independent judges, and cowing the media.
"You get a sense of sustained pressure, across the board," said Markian Bilynskyj, director of field operations for the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation. Democracy in Ukraine, he said, "has boundaries delineated by the people in power. Democracy is something that is to be permitted and distributed in doses."
Kuchma, who is scheduled to leave office in two years, says Ukraine is on its way to becoming a modern European democracy and just needs time to develop. His aides deny the government engages in censorship or uses law enforcement and the courts for political ends.
For the moment, the strong-arm tactics are helping Kuchma maintain his grip after opposition forces managed their largest show of strength to date, drawing tens of thousands of protesters to the streets in September. Following what critics describe as a campaign of threats and hefty bribes, a razor-slim majority of legislators last week pledged to work with the executive branch.
Television news coverage of Kuchma is now relentlessly positive: When he was humiliated at last month's NATO summit in Prague, for instance, Ukrainian media painted it as a diplomatic victory for the 64-year-old leader.
But some analysts say the real beneficiary of Kuchma's crackdown is its architect: Viktor Medvedchuk, the president's new and increasingly powerful chief of staff and one of Ukraine's richest oligarchs.
"There is a real sense that this administration is being run by Medvedchuk, and that he is performing a kind of dress rehearsal for when he becomes president," said Bilynskyj. "I don't think Kuchma is controlling all of this. But he is not stopping it." The trend worries Western leaders, who once dreamed that Ukrainian democracy would flourish. With nearly 50 million people, a territory the size of France and an arsenal that includes missile and nuclear technology, Ukraine was judged worthy of grooming for a democratic future. It has been one of the top recipients of U.S. aid and political support.
But that may be changing. The United States has given Kuchma the cold shoulder since determining this fall that he signed off on a clandestine plan to sell powerful Kolchuga aircraft tracking stations to Iraq in clear violation of an international embargo. U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual said last month that the Kolchuga affair and other disagreements have led to "a crisis of confidence" in Ukraine's top leadership. Kuchma denies approving the sale.
His administration is powerless to silence American grumbling. But the growing list of incidents involving political opponents, businessmen and journalists suggests domestic critics sometimes pay a steep price.
Take Serhiy Danylov, whose printing house last February published 900,000 copies of a book about Yulia Timoshenko, a leader of the opposition to Kuchma. Now on his press is another book, documenting what he says is the punishment tax authorities have meted out since then: more than 100 visits to his office and warnings to his clients. His business nearly ruined, he has cut his workforce from 304 employees to 25.
"I can say that the [Soviet] KGB [secret police] in 1988 was much kinder than the tax administration of Ukraine today," he said.
Or consider Yevhen Chervonenko, a legislator who spent the last decade building an international trucking firm. He said his support for Viktor Yushchenko, head of Our Ukraine and the country's most popular politician, has so far cost the firm at least $1 million in business after tax police this year froze bank accounts and seized trucks.
"I was an adviser of the president. I was a minister," he said. "When I was there, they did not touch me. But since I began to support Yushchenko . . . I am being told I will lose everything."
Yushchenko says two dozen companies with financial links to legislators from his party have been targeted.
If harassing legislators seems brazen, however, even some of Kuchma's advisers said they were stunned when police arrested Konstantin Grigorishin, a 37-year-old Russian businessman with more than $370 million invested in Ukraine's energy, metals and machine-building industries.
In an interview in Moscow, Grigorishin said officers pulled him out of his car after he left a restaurant in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on Oct. 12, planted narcotics in his jacket and stuffed a gun in his back pocket. "They even buttoned the pocket," he said.
He blamed his arrest on Kuchma's aide, Medvedchuk, and Hryhory Surkis, who together with Medvedchuk leads the Social Democratic Party, the political arm of a business clan that controls much of Ukraine's wealth. For the previous two years, Grigorishin said, he had been trying to end a business partnership with the two men because of their financial demands.
Last summer, he said, they asked for $50 million to finance the party's parliamentary campaign. When he refused, he said, the two systematically took over his Ukrainian companies, one by one.
"I was told, 'We won't let you do business in the Ukraine,' " he said. "Surkis said, 'We will put you in the trunk of a car, drive you to the woods and bury you alive.' Medvedchuk said they would put me in jail."
Medvedchuk has denied any involvement in the businessman's arrest, saying he never interferes in law enforcement cases. Surkis dismissed Grigorishin's allegations as nonsense.
Grigorishin was freed after 10 days in jail after Viktor Pinchuk, his friend and Kuchma's son-in-law, intervened. A Kiev court later found his arrest and detention illegal.
Lawyers who have fought Kuchma's government in court say that although a fair verdict is possible, judges increasingly fear they will be penalized for political disloyalty. Yuriy Vasilenko, an appeals court judge, estimates that only 10 out of about 200 judges in Kiev are truly independent. "As soon as a judge takes an independent stand, a complaint will be filed with a judicial directorate or another body," he said.
Former district court judge Mykola Zamkovenko considers himself a prime example.
In March 2001, he released Yulia Timoshenko from jail, striking down fraud and bribery charges brought by Kuchma's prosecutors. Two months later, police illegally raided his house.
In July, Kuchma fired him for incompetence. He now faces criminal charges of abusing his position and forgery.
"When I was making the decisions they liked, they were silent," Zamkovenko said. Now, he said, "They are using me to scare off the other judges."
Television journalists say they -- and their stations, which are mostly controlled by pro-Kuchma oligarchs -- also face repercussions if they do not follow the government's increasingly strict line. While certain topics were always taboo, now opposition leaders such as Yushchenko are simply banned from the air, said Andriy Shevchenko, a leader of the new union of journalists.
And for the first time, permitted topics are now outlined in faxes from the presidential administration. Kiev Post, an independent, English-language newspaper, published a copy of the government's media directive from Sept. 13, three days before a planned opposition protest that turned into one of the largest ever held here.
"Please cover the day's events in the following order in all this evening's news bulletins," it said. High on the list was a judge's ban on holding the protest in Kiev's center and a union leader's recommendation that workers not participate.
Serhiy Vasyliev, Kuchma's aide for information, said the directives are only suggestions. "Some journalists interpret them as instructions because they come from the president," he said recently. "But that is wrong."
Shevchenko said the proof is on the screen. For instance, he said, no television network has aired a single minute of now notorious tapes on which hours of Kuchma's private conversations are purportedly recorded.
That could be why so few Ukrainians know the story of Alexei Podolsky, a 45-year-old former member of parliament.
On June 6, 2000, as Podolsky finished printing a sheaf of anti-Kuchma leaflets here, he said, he was abducted by three men and driven 78 miles to the rural area of Sumi, where he was severely beaten.
Before the assailants left him in a grove of trees, he said, one of them warned him: "If you continue, you will pay with your life." When he returned to Kiev, he said, he found his front door burned.
Months later, Podolsky said, he read about his own abduction and beating in what purports to be a transcript of yet another secretly taped conversation in Kuchma's office. The transcript was posted on the Internet site of Oleksandr Zhyr, a leader of an anti-Kuchma party.
"The day before yesterday, he ended up all the way in Sumi oblast, the one that distributed. And they gave it to him there in such a way," said a man whom Zhyr identified as then-Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko.
Then Kravchenko told Kuchma about the burned door, according to the transcript.
"(Both laughing,)" the transcript says.
--------
Ukrainians Demand Reopening of Nuke Plant
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Chernobyl-Protest.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Braving freezing weather, thousands of Ukrainians rallied Tuesday to call for the reopening of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and to demand funding promised when the plant closed two years ago.
Some 8,000 to 10,000 people, including hundreds of pensioners and children who suffered health damage from the Chernobyl accident, came to Kiev's central Sofia Square.
Protesters demanded that Ukrainian and Western governments restore benefits to some 3.3 million people affected by the accident, or that the plant be partially reopened to provide electricity and jobs.
They waved banners reading ``Give Chernobyl a second life'' and ``No money, no safety.''
Chernobyl was the site of world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986, when one of its reactors exploded, sending a radioactive cloud over much of Europe.
``We want to restore everything that has been taken from these kids' lives -- medicine is not provided, there's no rehabilitation, no food. Everything has been taken from the children,'' said Nadezhda Matyesh, director of the Chernobyl Children's Fund for Survival.
After the one-hour protest, demonstrators broke into groups to picket the embassies of the Group of Seven richest nations, demanding their governments finance programs to meet Ukraine's energy needs and solve problems caused by Chernobyl's closure.
A U.S. Embassy representative attended the demonstration and received a letter of demands. ``We will read it and give it consideration,'' the embassy said.
Ukraine's cash-strapped government has been unable to meet its generous Soviet-era obligations to provide social protections for survivors of the accident. Demonstrators also protested cuts in Chernobyl benefits planned for the 2003 budget.
The Canadian Embassy said the G-7 countries and the European Union never agreed to provide funds to cover the social effects of Chernobyl's closure, adding in a statement that they have pledged $200 million more for technical work than was originally agreed in 1995.
Ukraine shuttered Chernobyl's last reactor in December 2000 and appealed for Western help in completing the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi reactors to compensate for the lost electricity capacity.
In April, officials at the Chernobyl plant said gaps in the concrete and steel shell, or so-called sarcophagus, that covers the damaged reactor total more than 10,700 square feet.
The Chernobyl Fund, composed of Western governments, the 15-nation EU and Ukraine, pledged more than $700 million to replace the existing sarcophagus over the reactor. Ukraine earmarked the remaining $50 million, but as of June only $130 million had been spent.
Work to construct a new covering is not expected to start before 2004 and should be completed by 2008.
Yuriy Andreyev, president of the advocacy group Ukrainian Union of Chernobyl that organized the demonstration, said one reactor at the Chernobyl plant could be restarted in two to three weeks ``if the West refuses to keep its promises.''
-------- us politics
Iraq has had last chance, says US
By David Rennie in Washington
17/12/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/17/wiraq17.xml/
America warned Baghdad yesterday that its arms dossier was its "last chance" to come clean and that it could not now take back or amend the declaration that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
The 12,000-page declaration released by Baghdad 10 days ago has already been criticised in London and Washington as dominated by recycled material, and containing "omissions big enough to drive a tank through". A mural of Saddam Hussein Mural at the entrance to 'Saddam City' on the outskirts of Baghdad
Asked if Baghdad would be given another chance to change the wording, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said: "I think it was abundantly plain, from the will of the United Nations, this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate, complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possessed. That was plain to all going into this one, last, final chance process."
Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, is expected to deliver an initial report on the Iraqi declaration to the UN Security Council on Thursday. Security Council member states are due to announce their first impressions at the same meeting.
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said Washington expected to issue a "final" statement by the end of the week.
It was already in close contact with UN experts and fellow permanent members of the Security Council, to share concerns that the declaration contains "problems".
The Bush administration had made no secret that it approached Iraq's declaration with scepticism, Mr Powell said. "The information I have received so far is that that scepticism is well-founded. There are problems with the declaration."
The Iraqi declaration, delivered on Dec 7, has been scrutinised by UN experts and the five permanent members of the Security Council.
To their annoyance, the 10 rotating members of the council have yet to see the declaration, and will be handed only a censored version, stripped of data on building nuclear weapons and other details judged too dangerous to share with non-nuclear governments.
As the Bush administration braces itself for a new push to rally sceptical allies behind action against Iraq, leaks from the Pentagon revealed a bitter debate between civilian hawks and more cautious uniformed chiefs over proposals to mount covert military propaganda operations in friendly countries.
Beside public "hearts and minds campaigns" run by US embassies and missions worldwide, the Pentagon has long run covert propaganda operations in hostile areas, ranging from air drops of propaganda leaflets, to "psychological warfare" designed to shatter morale.
A number of civilian hawks in the Pentagon have been pushing for the military to mount undercover operations to influence public opinion in allied or neutral nations, fighting anti-Americanism in the Middle East, Asia and even European nations such as Germany.
Examples given by officials yesterday included secretly funding outside consultants to organise public rallies. Military sources hostile to the proposal told the New York Times that covert operations could even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate version of Islam.
Washington-based officials said the hawks appeared to be in the minority for the moment, and noted that the White House had already closed down one fledgling Pentagon office, which was to be devoted to planting stories in the press, some of them involving "disinformation".
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.N.: Al-Qaeda's Afghan camps operating again
12/17/2002
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-12-17-alqaeda-camps_x.htm
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Al-Qaeda training camps have recently been reactivated in Afghanistan, and new volunteers are making their way into these camps, a U.N. report said Tuesday.
While Osama bin Laden's financial network has been mostly dismantled, the group still has "access to substantial funding from its previously established investments," said the report, which monitors sanctions on al-Qaeda.
The new camps were "simple," the report by the group led by British expert Michael Chandler said. It said the activation of such camps in eastern Afghanistan was increasing the long-term capabilities of the al-Qaeda network.
Chandler was expected to give more details on the findings later Tuesday.
The Oct. 12 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, confirmed the extent of relationships between al-Qaeda and the loose coalition of extremist groups in Southeast Asia, while the Nov. 28 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrated a shift in tactics by the group to hit soft targets, the report said.
The blasts in two nightclubs in Bali killed 192 people, mostly foreign tourists. In Mombasa, a vehicle packed with explosives plowed into the Paradise Hotel, 12 miles north of the Indian Ocean port. Ten Kenyans, three Israelis and at least two bombers died. Minutes earlier, unidentified assailants fired two missiles at an Israeli jet taking off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing the aircraft which was filled with Israeli tourists returning to Tel Aviv.
"Soft targets, preferably with maximum casualties, would now appear to be the order of the day," the report said.
Under U.N. sanctions, which the expert group is monitoring, all nations are required to freeze the finances and impose arms embargoes and travel bans on individuals and groups associated with bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Afghanistan's former Taliban leaders - wherever they are in the world.
According to the United Nations, the list currently has 311 names, including about 220 individuals and 90 groups.
About one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the report had warned the United States and other nations involved in the campaign against terror that al-Qaeda still had the money and recruits to strike.
It has repeatedly urged countries to abide by U.N. sanctions to freeze funding to suspected terror groups and provide names of terror suspects so that they can be tracked down.
"Many countries have refrained completely from providing names of such persons or entitites," the report said.
Most of these nations, which he did not identify, cited legal complications in accusing people or organizations of being linked to terrorism without enough evidence.
-------- africa
Peace Accord Signed in Congo
December 17, 2002
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/international/africa/17CND-CONG.html
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 17 - Congo's government and its major rebel movements signed a peace accord in South Africa today, hoping to bring an end to the war that has ravaged that country and roiled the continent for four years.
Under the power-sharing agreement, President Joseph Kabila will lead a transitional government for 18 months that will pave the way for the country's first democratic elections, officials said.
Mr. Kabila will have four vice presidents, one from each of the two principal rebel groups, another from the unarmed political opposition and another from Mr. Kabila's political party. Cabinet positions and parliamentary seats will also be divided among rebels and opposition parties.
The agreement comes just months after Mr. Kabila signed peace pacts with Uganda and Rwanda, the countries that backed Congo's rebels, and both of those nations have since withdrawn their armies from the country. Zimbabwe and Angola, which sent troops to support the government, have also withdrawn most of their soldiers.
South African officials, who helped broker the recent deals, hailed the recent string of agreements as the best chance for peace in Congo. At its height, the Congo war embroiled about six African nations in what was called Africa's First World War. About 2.5 million people have died since fighting began in Congo in 1998, most of them casualties of hunger and disease.
But Congolese officials were cautious in their evaluation of the agreement today, mindful of the failed peace efforts in the past and the enormous problems ahead.
In eastern Congo, tribal groups and traditional warriors are still battling for territory. Earlier peace accords have collapsed, including the Lusaka peace deal, which was signed by all warring nations and celebrated as a breakthrough in 1999.
In the coming months, the government and rebel armies must also find a way to put aside their animosities to create a national army, an effort that some fear could renew tensions.
"The combination of these agreements with these aggressor states and with the rebel movements will pave the way for peace, we hope," Kikaya bin Karubi, Congo's information minister, said in a telephone interview from Kinshasa today.
"I'm being cautious. I don't see problems ahead, but you can never be 100 percent sure. I hope everybody is as determined as we are to see peace prevail."
If peace truly does hold in Congo, historians may well point to this year as a turning point for several African countries rattled by seemingly relentless conflict.
In April, Angola's government and rebels signed a cease-fire to end nearly three decades of civil war. In May, Sierre Leone turned its back on its civil war to hold peaceful elections. In October, Sudan's warring factions signed a cease-fire, too, hoping to stop 20 years of internal conflict.
The outbreak of fighting in Ivory Coast, once an anchor of stability in West Africa, and the continuing ethnic violence in Nigeria have dampened hopes in some quarters. But President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa said that peace in Congo was a signal that Africa was moving in the right direction.
"You couldn't genuinely say we are moving forward to the reconstruction of the African continent, if the situation" in Congo remained unchanged, Mr. Mbeki said today.
The war in Congo, the vast country known for decades as Zaire, had its origins in the toppling of the long-ruling dictator Mobuto Sese Seko in 1997.
The coup's leader, Laurent Kabila, was initially supported by Rwanda and Uganda, but they grew angry with him over his harboring of Hutu militiamen who had been complicit in the Rwanda genocide.
In 1998 Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern Congo and began backing rebels operating in the region, hoping to oust the man they had helped install barely a year before. Congo's army was outmatched by Rwanda's, but Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe came to Mr. Kabila's rescue, sending in thousands of soldiers.
Fighting persisted even after the Lusaka peace deal of 1999, claiming the lives of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens. Then, in January 2000, Laurent Kabila was assassinated.
His son, Joseph Kabila, took over, intent on finding a way to end his father's war. Earlier this year hundreds of Congolese political and civic leaders met in Sun City, South Africa, to try to lay the groundwork for the country's postwar future.
One of the two principal rebel groups, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, backed by Uganda and based in the country's north, ultimately reached a power-sharing agreement with the Kabila government.
The other leading rebel group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma, based in the east and backed by Rwanda, refused and the talks ended without a comprehensive agreement. The negotiations continued, however.
Today, after two weeks of talks in South Africa, the Congolese Rally for Democracy signed the agreement along with representatives from the government and the other rebels.
"I think this is a symbol of hope, for our people in Congo and in the region," said Azarias Ruberwa, secretary general of the Congolese Rally for Democracy.
-------- britain
Britain denies Iraq war build-up under way
Reuters
Tuesday December 17, 2002 10:16 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-137834.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday that diplomatic efforts were still being pursued on Iraq and denied reports it was asking defence firms to speed up production of military equipment in readiness for war.
The Sun newspaper reported on Tuesday the ministry had begun the build-up for war by issuing Urgent Operational Requirement notices to defence equipment manufacturers and hiring a fleet of cargo ships to transport military equipment to the Gulf.
"It is purely speculative. As the Defence Secretary, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have been saying for weeks, military action is neither imminent nor inevitable and diplomatic routes are still being pursued," a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters.
The Defence Ministry said on Saturday it was preparing to send a fleet of naval vessels to the Gulf in February but said the deployment was routine and not part of war preparations.
A spokeswoman said the six-vessel deployment -- called Naval Task Group 2003 -- was part of a long-standing arrangement to take part in exercises with allies in the Gulf and later in the Asia-Pacific region.
Britain has been the United States' closest ally in its bid to force Iraq to comply with U.N. demands, and its troops are expected to play a key role in any military action.
Both countries have signalled that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can expect a war if he fails to comply with a tough U.N. Security Council resolution designed to ensure he has no weapons of mass destruction but say they will await a weapons inspectors report before taking action.
The ministry spokeswoman said that if such a decision was taken, then measures like hiring cargo ships and asking manufacturers to speed up production would be necessary.
"If we were to launch a long distance operation, taking heavy kit, we would need to do that. But that doesn't mean its definitely going to happen."
Any plans by Britain to participate in military action may be hampered by trade union woes at home.
The nation's firefighters, who have already carried out two nationwide strikes over pay since November, have threatened renewed action in the new year -- which would force thousands of armed forces personnel to provide firefighting cover.
Meanwhile, an opinion poll published by a British newspaper on Tuesday showed Britons are becoming more sure of their stance on any war with Iraq.
An ICM poll for the Guardian newspaper said opposition to a military attack rose three points to 44 percent but those who supported a war also rose, by four points to 36 percent.
The number of people who didn't know whether they would support military action has fallen by seven points to 20 percent.
-------- china
U.S. Commander Visits Chinese Military
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-Military.html
SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific said Tuesday he discussed North Korea and Taiwan with Chinese officials during a five-day visit that offered a sign of renewed military ties with Beijing.
Just 20 months after freezing contacts after the midair collision of a U.S. Navy spy plane and Chinese fighter jet, Beijing rolled out the red carpet for Adm. Thomas Fargo, who met top Chinese commanders and attended a live-fire exercise.
Fargo is the highest-ranking U.S. officer to visit China since the April 2001 spy plane incident.
He arrived amid a series of visits by American officials and a port call last month at the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao by the USS Paul F. Foster, the first U.S. warship allowed into China since the collision.
``There are clearly areas where we have shared interests in cooperating right now. The global war on terrorism is an excellent example,'' Fargo told reporters.
Beijing suspended U.S.-Chinese military ties, which were never close, following the April 2001 collision, which China blamed on the U.S. pilot. The American plane made an emergency landing on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, where its crew was held for 11 days. The pilot of the Chinese jet was never found.
Fargo said his trip was aimed at improving communication and interaction with China's 2.5-million-member military to prevent future mishaps.
``What we're looking for is constructive and useful dialogue. That kind of dialogue builds understanding and avoids miscalculations,'' he said. ``This visit's been a step in the right direction.''
Fargo said he discussed tensions over North Korea's nuclear program with Chinese officials, and said they agreed the Korean peninsula should be free of nuclear weapons.
Fargo said he thanked the Chinese for their support of a U.N. resolution on using force against Iraq, the object of intense diplomatic lobbying by Washington.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Fargo's visit ``enhanced mutual understanding.'' Liu said the two sides committed to boosting ``constructive and cooperative relations.''
``Both sides maintained that the two countries bear responsibility for world peace, stability and prosperity,'' Liu said.
The American commander said he was warmly welcomed during his visits to five Chinese cities, where he held talks with Chinese military leaders and regional commanders.
Fargo said he was one of the first U.S. military officers ever to visit Chinese military facilities in Chengdu, a southwestern city near Tibet where he observed the live-fire exercises.
On the subject of Taiwan, the biggest potential flashpoint between the two countries, Fargo would only say he ``exchanged views'' with Chinese officials. He called it a ``useful discussion.''
China and Taiwan have been ruled separately since splitting amid civil war in 1949. Beijing claims the island as its own and has threatened to attack if it declares formal independence.
-------- iraq
Kurds vow: '10,000 men in Baghdad'
By Ian Urbina,
Dec 17, 2002
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com//atimes/Middle_East/DL17Ak01.html
This weekend saw the close of an important conference in London of more than 300 delegates from the various groups of the Iraqi opposition forces. The point of the meeting was to present a new image of unity for the fractious and ever-bickering collection of anti-Saddam Hussein organizations. But ironically one of the few things that everyone at the US-sponsored meeting could agree on was that they did not want the US running Baghdad after Saddam. Far less clear was what sort of government they did want.
It was an accomplishment in and of itself that a wide array of organizations attended the two-day meeting. The main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - who fought each other for years - sat alongside the Iranian-backed Shi'ite group Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI). Also in attendance were the Constitutional Monarchy Movement and the National Accord Movement. One of the main organizers of the event was the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who draws strong backing from Washington.
But the event, which had been postponed several times due to party disagreements, was not without its glitches. The Iraqi Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the pro-Syrian branch of Iraq's ruling Baath Party all decided to boycott the function, claiming that they had been marginalized from the conference's organization and agenda. The Shi'ite Muslim al-Daawa Party also did not attend, stating that it could not condone a potential US attack on Iraq.
On occasion, tensions flared. One amused Iraqi observer said that he overheard one lifelong opponent of Saddam shout at another, "Just you wait until we have democracy in Iraq, and I'll throw you in jail!" Though all parties supported the notion of a federal Iraq, they tabled the decision over the type of federalism. While the Kurdish parties argued that a federation should be based on a bi-national model with an Arab and Kurdish state, others preferred a decentralization based not on ethnic but geographic lines.
There was, however, one important and contentious matter resolved, officially at least. The conference organizers ruled against forming a government-in-waiting. Despite the lobbying of the INC, which contended that forming a transitional government ahead of time would help limit US control of Baghdad post-Saddam, most other parties were skeptical, instead arguing that Chalabi intended to have the US parachute him into leadership. Some groups believe that Chalabi is still plotting behind the scenes, and while the INC strongly denies such accusations, it is also quick to point out the need for a "political authority" to be in place to avoid a "sovereignty vacuum" in Iraq.
The US strongly opposes the formation of a government-in-exile, arguing that it will alienate serving Iraqi generals who might mutiny once a war starts. Surely, the US also does not want to tie its own hands in advance concerning Iraq's political fate, and more importantly the economic status of its oil reserves.
Nevertheless, there are reasons other than the potential US occupation of Iraq for Chalabi and the INC to favor an early settling of the terms of any post-Saddam government. For all of his stated concern over the possibility of a power vacuum, Chalabi is more specifically worried that the Kurds will be the ones to fill it.
For the most part, Kurdish leadership has remained tight-lipped about their ultimate ambitions. But occasionally, they have gone on record with candor, and the vision they disclose predicts a potentially chaotic scramble for power once an invasion gets under way. While touring Iraqi Kurdistan, Chris Kutschera of Middle East Report magazine interviewed a number of high-level Kurdish military personnel and most admitted that it is not just the oil-rich city of Kirkuk - the so-called Kurdish Jerusalem - that the Kurds seek.
The US will likely send in the Kurdish peshmergas as the first wave of fighters, and these men do not intend to go half way. "We have an agenda for all possibilities," Kosrat Rasul, former PUK prime minister in Suleimaniya, remarked. "We want a share in Baghdad. If we have air cover, and artillery support, we can even take control of Baghdad. Geography is in our favor: Kalar and Kifri [two towns controlled by the PUK] are only an hour and a half to two hours from Baghdad."
Rasul has more in mind than merely ensuring that Kurdish diplomats are present during post-Saddam negotiations. "We must have a force of at least 10,000 men in Baghdad. Garrisoned in one of Baghdad's three big military bases, this Kurdish division will be a guarantee, protecting the government and democracy against an eventual putsch by some Iraqi general, as has happened so often in Iraqi history."
Without muscle behind it, Kurdish ambitions will go nowhere. "If we want federalism, we must be strong in the central government in Baghdad. If we do not go to Baghdad, the Shi'ites will come, or the military will take over."
This scenario strikes not only at the heart of Chalabi's fears, but also at the essence of his Achilles' heel. With the Pentagon as his primary backer, Chalabi - who is said to have more support on the Potomac than the Euphrates - lacks the strength inside Iraq to militarily exert his aspirations. Not having set foot in the country for over 20 years, Chalabi depends on a handful of wealthy exiles to stand by him. The Americans are the only ones with guns who might push his interests once war breaks out.
The London conference was Chalabi's main chance to establish political terms that he cannot possibly enforce on the ground in Iraq, and since the Kurds will likely be the primary US proxies on the front lines, they may be best positioned to get to Baghdad first. Unless the US decides to keep the Kurds on a short leash, Chalabi could conceivably find others already there to greet him when he and his transitional government parachute into Baghdad. In all likelihood, he is cutting deals at present to make sure that does not happen.
--------
Turkey to send troops into northern Iraq if U.S. attacks from north
The Associated Press
12/17/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-12-17-turkey-iraq_x.htm
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (AP) - Turkey has plans to send tens of thousands of soldiers into northern Iraq if the United States attacks through the north, senior intelligence and military sources said Tuesday.
The Turkish mission would be aimed at preventing a Kurdish state and stopping a possible flood of refugees, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some 4,000 Turkish troops, including engineers, have already been sent to the rugged, mountainous border region so that Turkish troops could quickly be rushed into northern Iraq if there is a conflict, said the sources, who have been part of the Turkish planning.
U.S. officials have apparently asked for Turkish permission to send tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers through Turkey into Iraq if there is a war. Turkish military officials have said that if there is an attack through the north, Turkey plans on sending its own soldiers into the region.
The daily Hurriyet newspaper reported Tuesday that Turkey is planning to deploy 65,000 to 70,000 troops in northern Iraq if there is a massive U.S. assault from the north.
A senior Turkish intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that report. He said that Turkey is especially concerned that if Iraq disintegrates, Iraqi Kurds could seize the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Mosul is a key regional center, and Kirkuk is home to major oil fields.
Control of those cities would make the Kurds a significant regional power.
It is likely that Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq would secure the area, but would not take part in fighting against Iraqi troops.
There has been no immediate reaction from Washington to such reports, which have filled Turkish newspapers during the past few days.
Turkish military sources said that if any U.S. attack is from the south and there is no major attack from the north, Turkey would beef up its forces in the north, but the troop moves would be significantly less than if there were a northern attack.
The northern region is controlled by Iraqi Kurds, who live in an autonomous zone in northern Iraq. Turkey is concerned that if Saddam Hussein is ousted, the Kurds might declare independence. Southern Turkey is overwhelmingly Kurdish, and Turkey fears that Kurdish independence in Iraq could inspire Kurds in southeastern Turkey, where Kurdish rebels fought a 15-year guerrilla war for autonomy.
Turkey is also concerned that instability in Iraq could lead to a flood of refugees across the border. In 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, some 500,000 Kurds fled to Turkey after Saddam crushed a Kurdish uprising.
As part of its Iraq preparations, Turkey has also boosted the number of soldiers it has in northern Iraq hunting Turkish Kurdish rebels. Those forces have been increased from some 5,000 to at least 7,000, a military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The Turkish Armed Forces are making preparations, taking measures considering different alternatives against any kind of development to protect Turkey's interests," the daily Milliyet quoted Prime Minister Abdullah Gul as saying.
In the past, Turkey has moved up to 50,000 soldiers into northern Iraq as part of its fight against guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK.
Turkey already has some 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers along its Iraqi border, a key site of guerrilla infiltrations into Turkey.
Asked how Turkey would react regarding Mosul and Kirkuk, Gul said: "We can't remain indifferent. We protect our interests."
Turkey was a key staging point for air attacks against Iraq during the Gulf War, and the United States is pressing for Turkish support during any Iraq attack.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited Turkey earlier this month to lobby for U.S. use of Turkish bases in the event of the war.
Turkey has not yet formally responded to that request and negotiations over the bases are currently under way.
Although Turkish leaders have said repeatedly that they are against a war in Iraq, Turkey is likely to have little choice but to extend support to the United States, Turkey's most important ally.
"Although we don't wish it at all, if there is an operation, of course it interests us," Gul said. "We're already in it. If there will be an operation, this will be done by a coalition."
-------- israel / palestine
American intervention in Israel's elections
By Akiva Eldar
Tuesday, December 17, 2002 Tevet 12, 5763
Israel Time
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=241378&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
The goodies U.S. President George W. Bush is showering on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are nothing more than a contribution to defrauding the Israeli voter. (Photo: Reuters)
For the opening of the new American operation meant to bring democracy to the Arab world, the Arabs are invited to learn how the West's greatest democracy gets involved in the only democracy in the Middle East. The upcoming elections in Israel are an opportunity for Jordan and Saudi Arabia to learn a lesson in the American game that Washington wants to export to them. Before the Arabs buy the product, they better find out if the United States makes do only with helping dictators who serve Washington's interests. The Israeli case proves that democracy does not make democratic regimes immune to brutal intervention by American politicians in their election campaigns.
This is not the first time that the United States has enlisted its political, economic and even strategic interests to influence an Israeli election. Most previous leaders did not hide their preference for moderate parties and candidates. The ambition to find a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, and thus contribute to stability in the Middle East, marked the intersection of the interests of both sides. But this Friday, Ariel Sharon will go down in history as the first right-wing candidate carried into government on the shoulders of an American president.
If there is no last minute change, U.S. President George W. Bush will cast a veto Friday against a proposal by the leaders of the European Union, the UN and Russia to publish the Quartet's "road map." It should be noted in this context that the U.S. State Department's David Satterfield was a key figure in drawing the map. As of now, Bush is even rejecting a compromise proposal that would have the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority respond only to the first, modest part of the Quartet plan. It's not the cease-fire clause, which is at the heart of the first part of the plan, to which the president objects, but another clause also at the heart of the first stage - the settlement freeze.
It's difficult to assess which interests and people are guiding Bush in his escape from any hint of a dispute between him and Sharon. Is it his desire to win the support of Jewish officials and tycoons, who have mostly lined up on Sharon's side? Is it because he regards the Israeli right wing in general, but particularly Sharon, as a suitable partner for his war on terror and Saddam Hussein? Or maybe he's attentive to the preaching of the neo-conservatives, both Jewish and Christian, who claim the Oslo agreements were a mistake and the Arabs will never be happy until they manage to throw the Jews into the sea?
One of those neo-conservatives, Elliot Abrams, who was recently given the Israeli-Arab conflict portfolio in the National Security Council, proposed two years ago to the Jewish community, in an article in Beliefnet, to cease referring to the "peace process," which he put in quotation marks, and said that "the end of American pressure on Israel must cease." In an article he published shortly after the last elections, he compared Sharon to Winston Churchill.
Whatever his motives, the goodies Bush is showering on Sharon, particularly his refusal to present the road map and his agreement to postpone, at Sharon's request, publication of the map until after the elections, are nothing more than a contribution to defrauding the Israeli voter. It raises suspicions that Bush is cooperating with the effort to hide the peace plan that will be put on the table the day after the elections. Instead, he allowed Sharon, speaking at the Herzliya conference, to get away with presenting a series of "understandings" the prime minister said he had reached with the president, without any mention of "road map" or "settlement freeze."
Who needs Amran Mitzna with his proposals to renew negotiations and dismantle "legal" settlements when Sharon is conducting negotiations with the U.S. president about increasing aid, and the White House is not disturbed by the perpetuation of "illegal settlements." Although Mitzna's positions are much closer to official U.S. policy regarding the settlements, it would be too much to expect the American president find an opportunity to encourage the Israeli peace camp. But it is not too much to demand that Israel's best friend cease trying to influence what is left of the only democracy in the region.
--------
No Peace in Sight, Israelis Trust in a Wall
December 17, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/international/middleeast/17WALL.html
KIBBUTZ METZER, Israel, Dec. 11 - The steel gate drew open and, in shorts and sandals, Doron Lieber walked briskly into the chilly, early morning darkness. He walked outside the rusting barrier that the kibbutz children call the "stupid fence," because it did not stop the mysterious terrorist who last month shot dead two of their friends, their friends' mother, and two others before escaping. He walked outside the "clever fence," the silver, electrified one that the Israeli government installed immediately afterward.
A left turn through fields he has farmed for 30 years pointed Mr. Lieber toward the limestone hills and olive groves of the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967 and where Palestinians dream of a state of their own. The boundary was less than half a mile away, silhouetted against a rising sun.
Mr. Lieber has new companions on his thrice-weekly walks - trucks that bounce back and forth to the 50-yard-wide gash that Israeli bulldozers have opened inside the boundary of the West Bank. It is the construction site for a separation wall or fence - both terms are used - planned to stretch at least 70 miles, though its precise path is still being debated. Another fence is under construction to envelop Jerusalem.
Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel's master builder, Israelis are transforming the land at the root of their conflict with the Palestinians at a rate unequaled since they first occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Settlers have built dozens of outposts on far-flung hills, spreading their handhold across the West Bank. Soldiers have dug ditches and strung barbed-wire fences around Palestinian cities.
But those efforts shrink beside the wall. With cement, guard posts and an electrified warning fence, the Israelis are seeking to split the two populations apart, creating a physical separation as stark as the social one has become.
From the Palestinian side, the wall looks like a land grab, as clear and pure as hate.
But from the Israeli side, its meaning is more layered. The wall represents a tortured compromise with the politics, values and history of Israeli Jews. On the one hand, fences evoke in Israel the pioneering ethos of the state's origins in small, protected communities. But on the other, they echo the European horror - the camps surrounded by barbed wire - that spurred Israel's creation.
Out of these conflicting influences, the wall is developing as an uneasy hybrid. It is a separation fence that still mixes both peoples on each side - in smaller, fenced enclosures. It is a boundary fence that does not create the internationally recognized border that many Israelis want.
Although he defies the logic of the fence with his pre-dawn walks in the open, Mr. Lieber, like most Israelis, is reaching a separate peace with it. He has accepted the growing barrier as necessary, he said, at least for "a few tens of years" to come.
This has been a year of separation, of division. Violence in the Middle East has pushed Israelis and Palestinians farther and farther apart and made hopes of reconciliation - seemingly so reasonable just a few years ago - look vain. Liberals like Mr. Lieber, still yearning for a new Middle East but ever more isolated in an Israel dominated by the right, have come to countenance the wisdom of walls.
Tom Segev, a dovish Israeli historian, called the idea of separation "a kind of magic medicine" that "reflects desperation."
"The whole concept of the fence is so interesting, because it demonstrates how there really is no solution to the conflict at this time," Mr. Segev said. "It's a conflict that can be managed, but it's a conflict that can't be solved."
Mr. Lieber believes Israel is making a historic mistake by building the wall through Palestinian fields, rather than right on top of the West Bank boundary.
"Before the fence, we lived here like good neighbors," he said, after the quiet returned in the dusty wake of another jouncing truck. He thinks the location of the fence provoked the attack on the kibbutz.
Moving in the opposite direction, Palestinians still take Mr. Lieber's route to smuggle themselves into Israel. With the Palestinian economy in ruins, most are desperate to work, but a few, security officials say, are eager to blow themselves up.
Mr. Lieber, 47 years old and the father of six, does not carry a weapon. "I'm a man of peace," he said, with an easy grin that lightly mocked the boast. "Whoever carries a gun ends up using it."
Until the attack on Nov. 10, Mr. Lieber believed that such attitudes, and the relations they helped nurture between the kibbutz and neighboring Arab villages, were the only defenses he needed. Now he is unsure. "If I can say it metaphorically, something cracked in here, close to the heart," he said, putting one palm against his chest.
The killings have cast an enduring shadow over this tranquil enclave, which today marked the close of the 30-day ritual mourning period for the two boys. They have darkened the world view of a collective that was already struggling to find its place in a new, harder Israel, where the old left-wing pioneer dreams of a democratic, secular Jewish society at home in the Middle East have been eclipsed by the extremism and harshness that violence generates.
In the airy kibbutz kindergarten is an alphabet chart in Hebrew, Arabic and English, recalling the possibility-filled years, not so long ago, of the dying Oslo peace agreement: "R" is for respect, "N" is for Norway, "H" is for hope. Nearby, children now play at catching the vanished gunman, dreaming up robots and Pokemon creatures to hunt him down.
Chosen for Attack
Unlike Palestinian gunmen who have wildly sprayed buses or settlements, the killer who attacked Metzer had the discipline to reach the kibbutz's heart before opening fire.
First he killed Tirza Damari, 42, out for a late-night walk with her boyfriend, who escaped. Then the gunman ran to the home of Revital Ohayon, 34, a single mother who had rented here because it was a nurturing environment for her boys, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4. Her home was the converted children's house, where all the kibbutz children slept until a few years ago.
The man tried to burst through the front door; the gash he left is still there, above the small pairs of boots and sandals that still wait. He made his way to his right, past the slide in the playground, climbed through a window, and killed all three.
Back outside, he killed Yitzhak Drori, 44, the kibbutz secretary, who was driving to the scene. The gunman then apparently escaped over the fence.
Residents of Metzer believe the kibbutz was a target because it was an example of co-existence. "They wanted to make a statement," said Dov Avital, a kibbutz leader.
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group connected to the Fatah faction of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, claimed responsibility for the killings, which came the night after Fatah representatives met in Cairo with leaders of the fundamentalist group Hamas in a bid to halt attacks in pre-1967 Israel. Metzer is in pre-1967 Israel.
At issue in the continuing talks, mediated by the European Union, are questions of strategy, ideology and the clarity of the Palestinian cause. Some Fatah leaders believe that by attacking only Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians would signal that they are fighting occupation, not to destroy Israel.
But Hamas wants to destroy Israel. What the Aksa Brigades want, and even if they know what that might be, is murkier.
"It was a technical mistake," said a 27-year-old Aksa spokesman in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, referring to the Metzer attack. "You're in a position where it's mixed borders. It was night. They didn't know where they were," said the man, who declined to be identified.
Israeli security officials say that the attack originated from Tulkarm. The army arrested a man they identified as the mastermind, Muhammad Naifeh, but it has yet to find the chief suspect, Sirhan Sirhan, 19.
The Aksa spokesman said that his group had "severe discussions" after the attack, and was trying to restrict violence to the West Bank. But, he acknowledged that, with Tulkarm regularly under curfew and emotions running hot, there was still some dispute between "the political and military wings of Fatah."
Another member of Al Aksa, Jamal Yehiyeh, said his view of the '67 line had changed. In a Tulkarm street last month, as he kept an anxious eye out for Israeli patrols, Mr. Yehiyeh said he was once enthusiastic about the Oslo vision of two states.
But just that morning, he said, he saw six Palestinian bodies, including children, in the morgue. "We paid too heavy a price," he said, as the conversation turned to Metzer. "The Israelis who are living here who want peace, they should go back to their countries."
Overhearing, Ali Abu Habli, a Tulkarm lawyer, angrily objected. "Our religion, our values conflict with that," he said, his voice rising as Mr. Yehiyeh shook his head. "The Israelis are killing our children, our women, our men. I don't want to reach the point where we are treating them the way they treat us."
A few days later, Israeli forces attempted to arrest Mr. Yehiyeh. He escaped, shot in the hand.
The village of Qaffin, just north of Tulkarm, is not seen by Israel as a hot spot. It lies 10 minutes' walk east of Metzer, past the crumbling concrete posts that mark the West Bank boundary and then across the construction site for the wall.
Taisir Harasheh, the mayor, said that he would believe that the Israelis were concerned about security if they were building the fence on the Green Line, as the West Bank line has been known ever since it was first sketched on a map in green ink after the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation.
Instead, the wall's path has already sliced through the village's olive groves, uprooting trees just before the harvest, and Mayor Harasheh said it would block the village of 9,000 people from 60 percent of its land. "If you make your neighbor hungry, you give him motivation to fight you," he said.
Most of the men in the village once worked in Israel, earning up to $50 a day in construction. A handful still works in Metzer's fields. Most residents survive now on savings, help from relatives abroad, and agriculture.
When Israeli forces posted maps on olive trees depicting the wall's route, villagers panicked. The plans called for a 55-yard-wide strip through almost four miles of village land. They described a concrete barrier 3 feet high, topped by more than 25 feet of electrified warning fence and flanked by asphalt roads.
Israel offered some compensation for land under the fence, but not for village land on the Israeli side. A gate would let farmers reach their trees, Israel promised. Villagers expect that gate to be shut when there is an attack. They expect it to stay shut.
Those whose land has been bulldozed have rejected compensation, perhaps out of principle, but also on instructions from the Palestinian Authority, led by Mr. Arafat.
Mayor Harasheh is a marine engineer who speaks fluent English and has taught himself Hebrew. He spent years traveling the world on ships.
As dump trucks leveled the site, which resembled an endless jet runway, the mayor could see the loom of the Mediterranean, unreachable but less than eight miles away. Before the 1948 war, Qaffin's land stretched almost that far. Metzer sits on land the village lost then.
"I look at the horizon, and I feel really depressed," Mayor Harasheh said. "I don't see any solutions."
One of several armed Israeli guards approached the mayor. Behind him trailed another guard, with an armload of oranges from the village trees. The guard told the mayor that village children had been pelting his men with stones.
"I'm telling you, please deal with the situation. It's better than having someone injured," the guard said.
"The kids don't listen," Mayor Harasheh replied sadly, in Hebrew.
The Dream of Co-Existence
Among the first projects of the founders of Kibbutz Metzer was a fence. The yellowed duty roster from Metzer's first day - Sept. 8, 1953 - records that Dov Cier had guard duty.
While the fence and guards sent one message, the kibbutzniks tried to send another, and so did their neighbors. "We dreamed," Mr. Cier, 72, recalled the other day after lunch in the kibbutz cafeteria. "This was the idea of socialism. We believe in brotherhood between people."
On that first day, the people of the neighboring Israeli Arab village of Meisir, which has no fence, brought the kibbutz water. Now, the water systems of the two communities are joined.
Mr. Cier and the rest of the kibbutz's founders came from South America, and members prided themselves on remaining friendly, as Israeli society grew angrier and more afraid.
The kibbutz, whose very name means border, used to supplement its income by offering "the school for co-existence," giving tours to Jewish tourists and schoolchildren of its grounds and then of Meisir. But though Metzer could once sell co-existence, no one is buying it anymore, and the business has dried up.
Like all the kibbutzim, Metzer, which has about 210 members, is struggling to fit into modern Israel, economically and socially.
These people were, in Mr. Segev's phrase, "the original nobility of Zionism." But as the socialist ideals faded, as Zionist models changed, the kibbutz children found themselves born into a loving but sometimes suffocating world. They yearned for more freedom. So they left.
Hoping to attract younger members, the graying kibbutzniks are adapting their formula. Members still contribute all they earn to the collective, but those who give more get more back in their personal budgets. Children live with their families, rather than together in a "children's house."
Having struggled with a generational divide, some kibbutzniks worry about the hold of Israel on its young. They speak of a cynical generation with less certainty about the Zionist cause. As he watched the trucks rumble toward the construction site from his patio here, Ben-Zion Hevroni said that for that reason, the new fence must become a border.
"Otherwise, I think there is no chance for us," he said, with great weariness. "All this idea of the Zionists, to come and build a homeland after 2,000 years, to live in a place called Israel and tah, tah, tah - all this will disappear. People are getting more and more cynical."
Before the attack here, Kibbutz Metzer pressed the Israeli Army to shift the fence the fairly short distance to the Green Line, to save the orchards of Palestinian Qaffin, even at some cost to its own land.
That effort has lost steam. "You know, I don't mind now about Qaffin," said Mr. Hevroni's wife, Nava, who found herself shielding her 8-year-old daughter with her own body during the attack. "I just want the wall."
The wall reflects the complexity of Israeli politics and the way religion infuses debate: An idea that gathered force on the left, it is the product of a hard-line right-wing government, yet some of its most vehement critics are of the right themselves.
Israel's military leaders insist the fence has no political message, only a security function. Yet, regarding the West Bank as their biblical birthright or as a security buffer against invasion, Israeli hawks fear that the wall will become a de facto border.
They also worry about settlers who may be left on the other side. These concerns help explain the wall's winding, still tentative route, which largely avoids the Green Line and encloses some Israeli settlers, while also trapping thousands of Palestinians on Israel's side.
Mr. Hevroni, whose first name means "son of Zion," has a brother, Israel, who is a settler. Ben-Zion Hevroni, 53, said that he often wondered, in his many years as a soldier and reservist, if he would be dispatched to retrieve Israel at rifle point. Now he hopes others will do it.
He said he was by no means certain that peace would come if Israel departed the West Bank. "But I don't care," he continued. "If there is a border, I have a moral right to fight for my country. I don't feel it now, with my brother on the other side."
If the settlers are forced out of the West Bank, he continued, "I will educate the next generation: `It's O.K. This is your country.' "
Children in the Conflict
Ayala Yichyeh has noticed that it is when they are happiest that the pupils in her kindergarten class remember their friends Matan and Noam. At a recent birthday party, the children wound up talking with their teacher "about whether you could do a birthday for a child who was dead."
Mrs. Yichyeh, a 47-year-old mother of 5 and a member of the kibbutz for 30 years, is left with 16 pupils, in a sun-filled class merrily strewn with simple toys - blocks, dolls, a discarded gas mask. There is a "peace corner" for children to talk through disputes: one yellow chair is painted with lips, another with an ear, a third with a heart; the children switch seats as they take turns speaking, listening, and feeling.
At 5 and 4, the ages of Matan and Noam, children are at a cusp, perceiving more than they can quite understand, understanding more, perhaps, than they can quite express. Against a classroom wall, one child's drawing portrays a night sky and a house. Beside the house, a menacing figure hovers above a chaotic swirl of scribbled lines.
The children know the killer is at large. Whenever Gil Hovar returns from reserve duty in Gaza, his son Nadav asks if he has killed the terrorist. Mr. Hovar tries to explain that he would prefer that the man be arrested, not killed.
Mrs. Yichyeh took the children to see the site for the wall. "I have to give them something to feel better," she said. "They are very afraid."
Last year, Mrs. Yichyeh's class held four joint sessions with a class from Meisir, the Israeli Arab village. This fall, a session was planned to teach the children about the olive harvest, but it was postponed after a suicide bomber struck a bus within earshot of Metzer.
Mrs. Yichyeh said she is determined to do something jointly this year. But a few parents are balking, which is perhaps hard for some in this idealistic place to admit.
"Some of the parents - not all of them - some of them told me - very few, but there are some parents - they told me they're afraid, not from the people of Meisir, but that someone could come across the border and do something to our children," she said.
Mrs. Yichyeh said it was important to teach the Jewish and Arab children that "they are equal, and they are different. They are not the same children, but they are our children."
In Meisir, one of the kindergarten teachers, Aida Abu Rkiya, 43, also looks forward to a joint session. "We found that the language was not a barrier," she said of last year's classes. "They were taking each other's hands and playing."
She said that the morning after the Metzer attack, the teachers began as usual by asking the 26 children how they felt. "Some said, `We aren't happy today because the kids were killed in the kibbutz,' " she said. Villagers paid condolence calls on the kibbutz.
Israel, a country of six million, has an Arab minority of about one million. Mrs. Abu Rkiya used to participate in Metzer's "school for co-existence," and she was amused by the astonishment of Jewish visitors that the Arabs had computers and ate similar food.
Mrs. Abu Rkiya said that her pupils talked about what they saw on TV. "They ask a lot of questions about why the army raided Tulkarm," she said, "why they killed a Palestinian." But they had not begun talking about the fence, she said.
The "Compassion" kindergarten in the Palestinian village Qaffin does not have the resources of its counterparts, and it does no joint sessions with different and equal children. A few drawings of the cartoon cat Sylvester adorn the walls. The teacher, Fakhrieh Ammar, 35, contends with 70 children in two classes.
Her pupils did not mention the attack in Metzer, she said. But the children do have impressions of the conflict, she said. One boy said that soldiers raided his home at night and arrested his uncle. Another reported that his father had been detained for two days while crossing the Green Line for work. Some children were helping in the orchards when the soldiers arrived to clear the area for the start of construction on the fence.
The children here want to grow up to be soldiers, she said, not understanding that they are Palestinian and the soldiers are Israeli. For them, she thinks, being a soldier means being powerful, unassailable.
"They see things on the TV, and on the ground, and they start asking: `Why?' " Mrs. Ammar said.
2 Small Tombstones
Avi Ohayon, the father of Matan and Noam, had not encountered death before the loss of his children, and he says he "didn't know where to put the pain."
"I just miss them. I miss them," he said. "I miss hugging them, I miss playing with them. I miss their smiles. I miss their being there for me. That's why I say everything in my life has been ruined."
His voice catches. "I must have done something very wrong."
On a Thursday evening, Mr. Ohayon, 34, sits with his legs tucked underneath him on a futon couch in his modest apartment in the seaside town of Caesarea. He wears blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He has a wispy black beard, because he is obeying the ritual and not shaving during the 30 days after the deaths of his sons and his ex-wife, his best friend since he was 16.
The television is on, but muted. A colt runs silently through a field. The album cover of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" is propped near Mr. Ohayon's stereo.
Mr. Ohayon, who works as an editor for Israel's Channel 2 television, talks about strangers' pitying glances when he buys cigarettes. He talks about watching parents with their children on the platform as he catches a train, one of his sons' favorite excursions. He talks about picking out small tombstones.
"I had to go and see rocks and say, `Wow, this rock is exactly for my son. This stone is exactly what Noam would like.' " There was not enough space for the lines he wanted inscribed.
He has not returned to work, because his job requires his total concentration. "If I'm concentrating, I'm afraid I'll forget my kids for 15 minutes," he says, "and it frightens me." He is scared all the time now.
Mr. Ohayon has developed a roll of film he found after the boys were killed. The pictures show the boys on vacation in Eilat: clowning with Popsicle sticks, sleeping curled up together on a bed. In one grinning pose, Noam reveals a missing front tooth.
In his sorrow, Mr. Ohayon has started thinking about how to solve the conflict. Asked about politics, he talks about fences. On the table before him is a two-year-old report by the Israeli comptroller about the risks of a fence along the West Bank. With bitterness, Mr. Ohayon says that while politics delayed the project, those risks - international criticism, increased suicide attacks - were realized anyway.
He has concluded that Israel is stuck, rotating governments as it has oscillated for the last 10 years between left-wing and right-wing solutions, both of which have failed.
There must, he suggests, be a third option. Otherwise Israel is waiting for "a thousand funerals" - for a terrorist attack so devastating that the military would respond with overwhelming force. That attack, he muses, could be 30 seconds away.
So why wait? "To solve the problem means thinking about us," he says. "Not what we are willing to give, but what we want for ourselves. Not giving 20 percent of the territories for their promise not to kill anyone outside the Green Line, not to give 50 percent of the territories for their promise to stop terror, not to give 90 percent for their promise for peace. We should stop thinking about giving, and start thinking what do we want for ourselves."
Pain appears to be hardening Mr. Ohayon, as it is hardening many on the other side of the wall that is taking form.
Israel could hold on to the territories, Mr. Ohayon suggests, and accept three million Palestinians within those borders, or draw the line some place else. "But," he said, "Make a border, not a fence that makes little ghettos."
------- latin america
Venezuelan army boss issues threat
From combined dispatches
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021217-6299886.htm
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela's army chief called the opposition closure of the oil industry "sabotage," as police fired rubber bullets into apartment buildings and tear gas into the streets yesterday, after protesters demanding President Hugo Chavez resign blocked highways and roads and threw stones at police in several Caracas neighborhoods.
Gen. Julio Garcia Montoya said yesterday in an address broadcast to the nation, that a strike paralyzing the oil sector amounted to sabotage, and he indicated his troops could counter it.
"The army is willing to use its full capability to prevent the success of this gamble for a economic and social collapse of the nation," he said in an address to the nation.
He made it clear the troops he commands were firmly behind Mr. Chavez, a former paratrooper whose government faces intense pressure from a 15-day-old general strike that severely affected state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela.
"It is an aggression against the survival of the state," he said, adding that the strike was "an attack on the vital interests of the nation," and suggesting it was unconstitutional.
With the world's fifth-largest petroleum producer in crisis, oil prices soared on international markets. Crude oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange topped $30 yesterday for the first time in two months.
Yesterday, enraged Chavez backers tried to break an opposition push to paralyze Caracas as the metropolitan area of 11 million people spun toward lawlessness.
Reuters reported that soldiers with assault rifles lined up outside a police station occupied by the army as opposition marchers demanded the soldiers leave. As the crowd grew, the soldiers retreated and police in riot gear fanned out to keep hundreds of opposition and Chavez supporters apart. Mr. Chavez ordered the army takeover of the city's police precincts in November.
The White House again urged Mr. Chavez to call early elections, but seemed to modify its stance by stressing - as Mr. Chavez has insisted - that those elections should come only under the rules spelled out in Venezuela's constitution.
Mr. Chavez has rejected demands for his resignation and early elections, saying the constitution does not allow them until August, the midway point in his current six-year term.
He has ignored courts that ordered him to give back seized gasoline trucks and return control of the police department to Caracas' opposition mayor. Mr. Chavez told military commanders that he - not the courts - gives their orders.
"We can't let an opposition-aligned judge prevent a military unit from carrying out orders from the president," Mr. Chavez said Sunday.
Using the slogan "Block your block," the frustrated opposition started its "takeover of Caracas" after a two-week strike devastated the economy but only strengthened Mr. Chavez's resolve.
Skirmishes between Chavez supporters and opponents erupted in several parts of Caracas and other cities as outnumbered police officers and national guard troops desperately tried to keep them apart.
"You can't throw rocks at police," one officer pleaded with residents of a central neighborhood.
Above him, opposition supporters leaned out of windows banging pots and pans in protest. Officers fired rubber bullets at the buildings, breaking windows and sending residents scurrying for cover. The sting of tear gas filled the air.
The opposition also blocked major highways and arteries in several spots. Protesters tried to choke off traffic with rocks, tree branches and flaming tires.
"We're not leaving," said Ana Reina, a 58-year-old retired teacher, one of about 1,000 opposition supporters on Prados del Este highway. "The police never come when there's a mugging or a robbery - just when they want to coerce us. But we're not afraid."
----
Venezuela Crisis Lacks Impartial Referee
Institutions That Could Help End Dispute Have Been Weakened Under Chavez's Rule
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64104-2002Dec16?language=printer
CARACAS, Venezuela, Dec. 16 -- President Hugo Chavez's campaign over the past four years to remake the political landscape in Venezuela has reduced key government institutions to a shambles, leaving Chavez and his opponents without trusted legal bodies to resolve their dangerous standoff and end a crippling 15-day-old national strike.
As increasing social and economic unrest raises the threat of violence, Venezuela's highest court, the national legislature and the elections board have all become politically suspect. Their impartiality has been undermined by Chavez's efforts -- some successful, others not -- to enlist the officials who run them on behalf of his leftist program.
Any solution to the crisis would likely have to be endorsed by at least one of those institutions. But as of now, they are all on one side or the other, either striking in support of the opposition or in legal limbo because the standoff has frozen political reforms -- even those already approved by parliament.
The institutional weakness has left Venezuela without a reliable national referee. As a result, it has been left to international mediators to look for legal ways to avoid a repeat of last April, when a national strike and street violence killed 18 people and led to Chavez's brief ouster in a military-led coup. The main avenue under consideration now is moving up national elections, currently set for 2006.
Cesar Gaviria, secretary general of the Organization of American States, has tried to play the role of impartial mediator in promoting talks between Chavez's government and the organized opposition over the past five weeks. But even his neutrality has been questioned, mostly by a frustrated opposition, as the strike has hardened views on both sides.
Today, in a preview of an increasingly provocative opposition strategy to force Chavez to resign or call early elections, large groups of government protesters fanned out to block highways and avenues across Caracas, the capital. Angry pro-government groups met them in several places and a stretched-thin police force used tear gas and rubber bullets in a struggle to keep the rival demonstrators apart.
"The political crisis has to a certain extent gotten in front of the political institutions' ability to manage it," said Thomas A. Shannon, a deputy assistant secretary of state, after a two-day visit here last week. "That's why what's happening at the negotiating table is so very important, because if a solution is not found, we could be on the edge of some larger social confrontation for which we would have no idea how it would go."
Promising a "social revolution" with his 1998 election, Chavez pushed a series of successful referendums that gave the country a new constitution, a unicameral legislature and several new "citizen powers" designed to keep an eye on the government.
In doing so, Chavez sought to dismantle a relatively closed two-party system that had dominated political life here for four decades. He took control of the National Assembly, packed the supreme court and the National Electoral Council with political allies and pushed a program that riled much of the powerful upper class.
A former army colonel, Chavez also turned to the 80,000-member armed forces as a stand-in political party, appointing many of them to civilian government posts and giving them the right to vote for the first time.
His political opponents say Chavez violated the constitution's separation of powers guarantee. The most glaring example, they say, came in November 2001, when the president decreed 49 laws under emergency powers given him by the legislature. Those included such apparently non-urgent items as land reform and an energy law that gave the government greater control of the vital oil industry.
A month later the opposition called its first national strike.
Although Chavez has lost influence within the supreme court and the legislature over the past year, nearly every institution is now viewed as partisan. Even the Catholic Church, traditionally a conservative force here, has lost its ability to serve as impartial mediator after unsuccessfully opposing Chavez on his constitutional recognition of other religions.
"Right now you need a referee, something trustworthy, neutral," said Ismael Garcia, a congressman from the pro-government Podemos party. "And right now we don't have that."
At the center of any future resolution is the National Electoral Council, but the five-member panel is serving only on an interim basis, pending implementation of a new election law passed last month.
The council voted last month to allow a non-binding referendum in February on Chavez's rule, a move the president declared unconstitutional. The decision was overturned the same day by the supreme court for failing to have the required four votes. The opposition immediately condemned that ruling as partisan. Then, a few days later, the council approved it with the required four votes -- prompting Chavez to object that the commission was biased against him.
The solution would appear to be simple: Implement the new election law, which calls for a 21-seat electoral council with members from the government, opposition and civil society. But the National Assembly has been unable to meet to begin discussing appointments because of a walkout by opposition legislators in support of the strike.
Without an impartial government venue to settle differences, Chavez and the media have emerged as the key protagonists. The media openly oppose the president. Chavez has responded by calling media owners "fascists" trying to overthrow his government.
Roy Chaderton, the foreign minister and a government negotiator, said in an interview that any agreement on early elections would have to include guarantees that Chavez would have "fair access" to the media.
"How do you run a campaign when the major media now calling the president a killer are against it?" Chaderton said. "I'm not saying the government hasn't made its share of mistakes. But in a democracy you pay for those in fair elections."
In tearing down old institutions, Chavez has also built new ones. The government-sponsored Bolivarian Circles, supposedly small neighborhood advocacy groups, have emerged as the vanguard of pro-Chavez forces in the streets and are highly distrusted by the opposition.
The military could again emerge as the most important institution here if fresh violence breaks out, but it, too, is divided.
By putting the armed forces to work on behalf of his program -- using them to paint public housing, supply neighborhood markets, and build roads and bridges -- Chavez deepened traditional divisions between the conservative officers corps and lower ranks with humbler roots. The split was apparent in April when, two days after the coup, soldiers loyal to Chavez rebelled against the interim government that had been installed by senior officers. Chavez returned and has since purged much of the senior officer corps.
------- mideast
TURKEY REPORTS DROP IN U.S. COMPENSATION OFFER
December 17, 2002
Middle East Newsline
http://menewsline.com/stories/2002/december/12_17_1.html
ANKARA [MENL] -- The United States is said to have reduced its military compensation package to Turkey for Ankara's participation in any U.S.-led war against Iraq.
Turkish officials said the compensation package presented by the Bush administration has fallen far short of the original estimate of $3.5 billion. They said the real value of the package appears to be between $1 billion and $2 billion.
The aid figures were discussed during last week's visit by Turkish ruling party chief Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Washington. Erdogan, head of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party met President George Bush and senior administration officials regarding Ankara's participation in the war against Baghdad.
Officials said Erdogan tried to pin down the White House on exactly what the United States was offering Turkey. After several attempts, they said, Erdogan was provided with figures that were at odds with the pledges of administration officials during their visit to Ankara last month.
NOTE: The above is not the full item.
-------- nato
NATO, EU ink peacekeeping pact
By Jitendra Joshi
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021217-91259040.htm
BRUSSELS - NATO and the European Union yesterday sealed a cooperation pact that will allow EU peacekeepers to deploy for the first time, with Macedonia first in the 15-nation bloc's sights.
The accord was adopted in a joint declaration by NATO Secretary-General George Robertson and the European Union's high representative for foreign relations, Javier Solana.
"The EU-NATO declaration today is a vital milestone in the history of the NATO-EU strategic partnership," Mr. Robertson told reporters.
"What we've done today is to lay the foundation of a permanent framework from the European Union and NATO in support of peace and stability."
Mr. Solana said the NATO-enlargement summit in Prague last month and last week's EU summit in Copenhagen, which agreed to welcome 10 mostly ex-communist countries in 2004, had "changed the landscape of Europe."
"At the same time, today we have finalized a very important agreement between the European Union and NATO that will allow one of the most important projects that the European Union has now," said Mr. Solana, who led NATO before Mr. Robertson.
The long-awaited pact was agreed on Friday by EU leaders meeting in the Danish capital and by NATO, after pivotal alliance member Turkey overcame its objections despite failing to secure a firm date to begin EU-membership talks.
The deal had been agreed to in principle in October, but the EU's planned deployment of peacekeepers in Macedonia was postponed twice pending agreement with Turkey to share NATO resources, especially heavy-lift aircraft.
After Turkey finally gave the go-ahead, the EU said it was ready to send its troops into Macedonia "as soon as possible," probably in February, and was also willing to deploy soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina to replace NATO forces in both countries.
The EU-NATO declaration included a section outlining "respect for the principles of the Charter of the United Nations" and the obligation for one country not to indulge in unilateral military action.
Rivals Greece and Turkey held up the deal for months by seeking assurances that any EU peacekeeping force would not use NATO assets to meddle in the eastern Mediterranean, in particular on the divided island of Cyprus.
"It's very important that we bring together the particular concerns of Greece and Turkey in relation to the Aegean," the NATO chief added.
The dithering over deployment of peacekeeping forces has gone to the heart of the EU's faltering 3-year-old drive to build a common European security and defense policy.
France wanted the bloc to go it alone in Macedonia without using NATO resources, but other EU states, notably Britain, were pushing for a partnership with the U.S.-led military alliance.
But now with the NATO agreement in the bag, the EU can get planning seriously to replace the alliance's 900-strong force in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and eventually the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia.
The EU is also trying to put together next year a 60,000-strong rapid-reaction force that would be ready to tackle humanitarian and peacekeeping missions that NATO prefers not to join.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Withdraws Most Fighter Jets
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has withdrawn most of its fighter aircraft from forward bases as part of the deescalation of tension with nuclear rival India, the head of Pakistan's air force said Tuesday.
The announcement by Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir came a day after Pakistan's president held a top level meeting to review the progress of troop withdrawals along the 1,800-mile border.
Mir would not say how many aircraft were involved in the pullback or when exactly it began.
Pakistan and India almost went to war earlier this year after India blamed Pakistani-based militants and Islamabad's spy agency for a deadly attack on the Indian Parliament last December. Both counties sent hundreds of thousands of troops to the border after the attack, in which 14 people were killed.
However, the situation began to improve after intense international diplomacy. On Nov. 28, Pakistan announced it was pulling back its troops after a similar pledge from India in October. Pakistan's navy has already moved its ships to ``normal positions'' in the Arabia Sea.
Mir, however, said the stand-down would not effect Pakistan's efforts to produce or acquire high-tech aircraft.
``If the Indians get more high-tech aircraft, Pakistan will also be needing advanced aircraft,'' Mir said.
Mir said Pakistan is manufacturing a number of K-8 trainer aircraft, with the help of China.
Mir also said Pakistan is manufacturing a new model of aircraft, called the ``Super Seven,'' also with the collaboration of China. He said the first such aircraft would be ready for a test flight in June.
-------- spy agencies
Shelby Urges Creating New Intelligence Service
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63850-2002Dec16?language=printer
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) has called for creation of an intelligence organization headed by a director of national intelligence who would have overall responsibility for analyzing information and would be the president's principal intelligence adviser. It would separate the new position's responsibilities from spying, covert operations and technical satellite collection activities that would continue to be carried out under the direction of the CIA and the Pentagon.
Shelby, who is leaving the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after six years as chairman or vice chairman, made his proposal in an 85-page valedictory appended -- under the headline "additional views" -- to the report of the joint Senate-House committee that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
There is a need, Shelby wrote, "to separate our country's 'central' intelligence analytical functions from the resource-hungry collection responsibilities that make agencies into self-interested bureaucratic 'players.' "
The House-Senate intelligence panel also recommended naming a new director of national intelligence as a Cabinet member, but the committee's plan would give the new director control over CIA and Pentagon intelligence collection. Shelby questioned whether this transfer could be accomplished because of bureaucratic resistance within the CIA and Pentagon.
"DOD [the Defense Department] and its congressional allies would make such centralization an uphill battle, to say the least," he said.
Shelby has been one of the most vocal critics of CIA Director George J. Tenet on the Senate intelligence committee, charging that Sept. 11 was the latest in a series of intelligence failures under Tenet's watch. The plan he proposed in his appendix statement would limit the CIA director's responsibilities to covert activities.
Shelby's proposal would put clandestine human intelligence collection, now run primarily by CIA, into a "specialized service" devoted to covert operations. That new service, along with Pentagon technical, electronic and satellite collection agencies, "would feed information" into the new, centralized intelligence analysis organization.
Shelby accompanied his suggestion with a sharp criticism of the Defense Department, which controls 80 percent of the country's overall intelligence budget.
He said Pentagon intelligence-collection agencies, such as the National Security Agency (NSA), which intercepts electronic signals, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which analyzes satellite imagery and makes military maps, are used primarily to support military operations. He said this is despite their being "vital parts of the national intelligence system, and provide crucial intelligence products to national-level consumers, including the president."
What this means, Shelby concluded, "is that in any unresolvable resource-allocations conflict between the Secretary of Defense and the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence], the secretary must prevail."
The new intelligence analysis organization, Shelby said, would be built around the CIA's directorate of intelligence. This was the original idea for the CIA when it was created in 1947. After the experience of Pearl Harbor and World War II, intelligence analysis was supposed to be fused in the new agency. Before the war, analysis had been conducted separately by the Army and Navy, with the Office of Strategic Services added during the war.
In an interview, Shelby said changes were needed because the intelligence community needs to become "agile." Despite Sept. 11, he said, it remains "hard-wired for the Cold War."
"Fighting groups as flexible as terrorists," Shelby said, "requires we have to be flexible."
--------
C.I.A. Chief Prospers From Bond With Bush
December 17, 2002
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/politics/17TENE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - When George W. Bush was president-elect, he got some fateful advice about his daily C.I.A. briefing from a man who would know.
Mr. Bush's father, the only president to have served as C.I.A. director, was in the unique position of having both given and received the secret morning updates, and often told friends that his time in the 1970's at the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., was one of the best jobs he ever had.
He unequivocally instructed his son, said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, to develop a close relationship with the person who ran the spy organization and oversaw the other intelligence agencies that make up America's covert empire.
"The former president reinforced how important it was that a president have face-to-face meetings with the C.I.A. director, rather than just receive his intelligence reports on paper," Mr. Card said in an interview last week.
"And so the president-elect told me, when I was the chief of staff-designate: 'Make sure that happens. I want to see the C.I.A. director and be able to talk with him.' "
At that moment one of the most unlikely and important relationships in Washington was born. President Bush, the 56-year-old Texas-bred product of Andover, Yale and the Republican establishment, would bond with George J. Tenet, the 49-year-old gregarious Clinton appointee who once worked as a busboy in his father's Greek diner in Little Neck, Queens. In those days, Mr. Tenet once joked, he had "the biggest mouth in town."
Two years into the relationship, Mr. Tenet has faced bitter public criticism over the intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks, yet his link with Mr. Bush has not only survived but been strengthened by the ongoing campaign against terrorism and the crisis over Iraq. Friends and critics of Mr. Tenet agree that the president's trust explains why an embattled C.I.A. director caught unaware by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remains in his job. Last week, Mr. Tenet was once again under fire as a joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks issued a report sharply criticizing the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies for failing to thwart the plots, which killed more than 3,000 people.
"The most important factor in determining the director of central intelligence's success is his relationship with the president of the United States," said John M. Deutch, Mr. Tenet's immediate predecessor as C.I.A. chief. "And George Tenet has that as well as anybody ever has." Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed for this article.
Administration officials say Mr. Bush will not forget how Mr. Tenet regrouped after Sept. 11, and marshaled C.I.A. forces in Afghanistan to work with opposition forces to the Taliban, buy off warlords and direct American bombers to critical targets. But equally important, friends say, is that the two men have a similar chemistry.
"They're pragmatists, they talk sort of `male talk,' " said Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was co-chairman of the committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. "George is a very smart person, but his rhetoric isn't theoretical. It's blunt. It's straightforward."
Advisers say Mr. Bush, who grew up with resentments about the East Coast elite, likes Mr. Tenet for his lack of pretense. In a speech in 1999 at his alma mater, Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens, Mr. Tenet called himself "the short fat guy from Little Neck," and told the crowd that "many of you will go on to college and you will run into people who went to fancy prep schools and who appear to have a higher quality education than you do. They don't."
Former C.I.A. officials say Mr. Tenet's relationship with Mr. Bush's father is also a critical factor in his success. The 41st president was overwhelmed, friends say, when Mr. Tenet named the agency headquarters after him in 1999. Agency officials point out that it was Republicans in Congress - not Mr. Tenet, then President Bill Clinton's C.I.A. director - who pushed through the legislation for the renaming. But at the ceremony, Mr. Tenet and the former president were seated next to each other and appeared to bond strongly. It was the kind of gesture that feeds Mr. Tenet's reputation as a man who brilliantly cultivates those important to his advancement.
Friends of the first President Bush will not say whether he advised his son to keep Mr. Tenet on the job - "the president made his own decision," Mr. Card said. But no one disputes that the elder Mr. Bush has long said that C.I.A. directors should be apolitical, and that he felt wronged at the end of the Ford administration in 1977 when President Carter would not keep him on as director.
Mr. Tenet has benefited from other political mentors, too, and sharpened his political skills as a top aide to former Senator David Boren, the Democrat from Oklahoma who headed the Senate Intelligence Committee in the 1980's. "He has not politicized the office and therefore he has retained excellent ties with leaders of both political parties," said Mr. Boren.
Last Wednesday, Mr. Tenet began his day with more thunderbolts cracking down from Capitol Hill. The joint Congressional committee investigating Sept. 11 issued its bad-news report, and Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is Mr. Tenet's most caustic critic, said the C.I.A. director should be held personally responsible.
Perhaps worst of all, at least from Mr. Tenet's point of view, Mr. Shelby and the committee called for a cabinet-level national intelligence chief who would threaten Mr. Tenet's authority. Mr. Shelby, in a separate report, said "one of the great unanswered questions" of Sept. 11 was how Mr. Tenet "could have considered himself to be `at war' against this country's most important foreign threat without bothering to use the full range of authorities at his disposal."
In explaining Mr. Shelby's animosity, C.I.A. officials cite what they call "The Day of Great Affront," when the senator was not seated on the dais at the C.I.A.-renaming ceremony. Mr. Shelby has long denied holding a grudge against Mr. Tenet over the event.
Mr. Tenet's strong ties to the Bushes have proved far more important than his poor relations with Mr. Shelby. At a black-tie dinner of the Republican establishment honoring Mr. Tenet last week in Georgetown, father and son sent letters wrapping Mr. Tenet in familial devotion.
"You are a true patriot, an asset to our nation and a valued adviser," President Bush said in his message, which was read aloud to the crowd at a dinner of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom at the Four Seasons Hotel. Former President Bush was no less effusive. Mr. Tenet, he wrote, was doing a "superb job" as his son's intelligence chief. He added that the problems he himself faced as C.I.A. director a quarter century ago "are nowhere near as complicated as the problems faced today."
Mr. Tenet clearly agreed with that assessment. That night his speech amounted to a lengthy defense of the agency's knowledge of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11 and its success in capturing terrorist leaders since then. Echoing favorite phrases of his president, Mr. Tenet painted a picture of a C.I.A. that was at the center of the campaign against terrorism.
"We are still in the `hunt phase' of this war - the painstaking pursuit of individual Al Qaeda members and their cells," Mr. Tenet said.
Mr. Tenet's influence derives from his near-daily half-hour meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Bush, usually starting at 8 a.m. It is the president's first briefing of the day and is attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Card and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. It is followed by a half-hour briefing from Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, but administration officials say Mr. Bush has not developed the camaraderie with Mr. Mueller that he has with Mr. Tenet.
Few other presidents have so regularly seen their C.I.A. directors. (R. James Woolsey, President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, met with him so rarely that when a small plane crashed into the White House South Lawn in 1994, the joke at the C.I.A. was that it was Mr. Woolsey trying get in to see the president.)
Mr. Bush sees Mr. Tenet more often than he does Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In recent months Mr. Rumsfeld has challenged Mr. Tenet's authority by proposing a new position at the Pentagon, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and by setting up his own intelligence unit to search for Iraq's links to terrorists. At least one defense official has said the tension between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. is intensifying as the administration prepares for a confrontation with Iraq.
Although C.I.A. officials will not discuss such operations publicly, the agency is widely believed to be running operatives into northern Iraq to work with Kurdish opposition groups to Saddam Hussein.
For now, then, Mr. Tenet's position seems secure. The White House has not endorsed the Congressional proposal to establish a domestic intelligence czar and is unlikely to do so until the newly established commission examining the Sept. 11 attacks completes its work.
"The president has confidence in how George Tenet does his work, and how he analyses intelligence," Mr. Card said, "but also how he suggests how the intelligence should be used - what actions should be taken because of it. In the war against terrorism, many of the soldiers are actually under the command of George Tenet, a kind of covert army. It's something that we don't have full appreciation of, but they are on the front lines."
In the meantime, Mr. Tenet scoffed last week at recurring talk that should things go badly for him at the agency, he would run for Congress from Queens.
`Never," Mr. Tenet said during the cocktail crush at the Nixon Center dinner. "It's not going to happen. I've got the best job in government."
-------- propaganda wars
PENTAGON White House Plays Down Propaganda by Military
December 17, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/international/17MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - The White House today distanced itself from a secret Pentagon directive that would authorize the military to carry out covert operations to influence public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries.
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, acknowledged that there was widespread recognition throughout the Bush administration that the United States had to work harder "in better communicating America's message of hope and opportunity."
But Mr. Fleischer told reporters they should not presume that the Pentagon's idea had advanced very far and cautioned that President Bush would not approve of anything that involved lying.
"The president has the expectation that any program that is created in his administration will be based on facts, and that's what he would expect to be carried out in any program that is created in any entity of the government," he said. When asked whether that included manipulating foreign media, like planting false news stories with foreign journalists, Mr. Fleischer said, "No, I don't think that's anticipated."
Mr. Fleischer was responding to questions about an article in The New York Times that disclosed the existence of a secret directive that conceived a sweeping program to discredit and undercut the influence of mosques and religious schools, as well as planting news stories in newspapers and other periodicals in foreign countries.
Earlier this year, Mr. Bush reacted angrily to reports that a new Pentagon bureau, the Office of Strategic Influence, was considering ways to plant false information with unwitting foreign journalists. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was forced to close the office.
A senior administration official said the Defense Department's proposed directive had "caught the White House by surprise."
Mr. Rumsfeld has not decided on the Pentagon directive, which has set off a fierce debate over whether the military should apply its considerable resources to carrying out secret propaganda missions in friendly countries like Germany or Pakistan, which Qaeda terrorists have used as bases, defense officials said.
Such a program would aim to undermine mosques and religious schools in the Middle East and Southwest Asia that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy. It might funnel money to help establish alternative schools or pay foreign journalists to write articles favorable to American policies.
If adopted, the directive would permit activities well beyond what is done now, which range from psychological operations to using electronic countermeasures against enemy radars.
The military's Central Command, for instance, said American aircraft had dropped 480,000 leaflets early today over southern Iraq. The leaflets contained six different messages and were dropped at six locations, including near communications facilities that were damaged or destroyed by coalition aircraft flying missions on Saturday over the no-flight zone in southern Iraq.
The leaflets dropped at those locations warned Iraqi forces that allied planes had made targets of Iraq's fiber-optic cables, and that trying to repair them would put Iraqi soldiers at risk. Other leaflets referred Iraqis to radio frequencies where they could hear broadcasts by coalition forces and warned Iraqi air defenses that firing on allied aircraft or tracking them with radar could draw airstrikes.
--------
Pentagon Broadcasts Propaganda Over Iraq
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon has launched a radio propaganda war in Iraq, broadcasting anti-Saddam Hussein messages officials say are aimed at weakening his support among his people and his military.
``People of Iraq ... the amount of money Saddam spends on himself in one day would be more than enough to feed a family for a year,'' said an English translation of one radio broadcast released by the U.S. Central Command. ``How much longer will this corrupt rule be allowed to exploit and oppress the Iraqi people?''
``Soldiers of Iraq. Saddam does not care for the military of Iraq,'' said another of several radio messages. ``Saddam uses his soldiers as puppets ... for his own personal glory.
``Saddam also sacrificed thousands of soldiers during the Iran/Iraq war ... When the Iraqi soldiers that were taken prisoner were returned, Saddam ordered their ears to be cut off as punishment for being captured. ``
Transmitted five hours a night from American planes flying outside the country, the broadcasts are the first of their kind since those used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War when Iraqi forces were ousted from Kuwait, defense officials said.
The broadcasts of Arabic music and anti-Saddam messages began Thursday, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Daniel D. Hetlage. But the program only became known Monday when the Central Command said it had dropped 480,000 leaflets over the southern no-fly zone in Iraq, including some alerting the Iraqis to radio frequencies and times to tune in to the American broadcasts.
The radio programs aim to ``dissuade the Iraqi military from supporting Saddam,'' said Hetlage.
Other versions include ones on Saddam's past use of weapons of mass destruction and explaining the world's view of weapons inspections now under way in Iraq.
They are being transmitted from an Air Force EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft, according to another official.
Leaflets dropped Monday to advertise the broadcasts feature a map of Iraq and two radio transmitters, with a message saying ``Information Radio'' can be heard from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., at five frequencies.
The mass drop of nearly half a million leaflets was the seventh distribution of flyers over southern Iraq in three months -- and the largest. Leaflets were dropped over six locations and also included messages warning Iraqi military not to shoot at coalition aircraft monitoring the restricted zones, saying the zones are set up to protect the Iraqi people.
Officials said other drops have had little effect in getting Iraqi forces to stop harassing British and American planes that have been monitoring no-fly zones set up a decade ago over the country. The northern zones protect the Kurdish minority and the southern zones protect the Shiites. Saddam considers the zones a violation of his sovereignty.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that Iraq's weapons declaration bears out U.S. skepticism that Saddam would come clean.
He withheld a detailed assessment of the Iraqi declaration on weapons until chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix reports to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, but said the declaration appears suspect.
``We said at the very beginning that we approached it with skepticism, and the information I've received so far is that skepticism is well-founded,'' Powell said in his first public comments on the declaration. Powell told reporters at the State Department that the United States was in consultation with international weapons inspectors and other Security Council members on what to do next.
If Iraq refuses to disarm, Powell said, ``The international community has an obligation to act and do whatever is necessary to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, and that includes the use of military force.''
Iraq has denied harboring chemical and biological weapons and having programs to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
Last week, Bush administration officials dismissed the 12,000-page declaration as woefully short of facts. ``We know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and has programs to create more,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Panel warns against 'secret police'
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021217-30408812.htm
The FBI could be perceived as "a kind of secret police" if allowed to continue carrying out traditional law enforcement duties while also gathering terrorism intelligence, a federal commission said in a report issued yesterday.
The panel suggested creating a new agency to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence. The National Counter Terrorism Center would include analysts working for the CIA, FBI and other agencies.
"It is important to separate the intelligence-collection function from the law enforcement function to avoid the impression that the U.S. is establishing a kind of 'secret police,' " said commission members, comprising federal, state and local officials and chaired by former Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III.
Justice Department officials opposed the recommendation. Attorney General John Ashcroft "believes that the FBI is well-suited to serve as the domestic intelligence and terrorism-prevention agency in the United States," spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in an interview last week that the FBI was "uniquely positioned" to do the job because it could both detect the threat and arrest any individuals involved.
"There has to be a mechanism for deterring those individuals," Mr. Mueller told the Associated Press. "We have the same people who have knowledge of intelligence and knowledge of criminal activity being undertaken by these individuals."
Mr. Gilmore said intelligence agencies still are having problems sharing information, and a new agency could help resolve those difficulties.
The panel warned that efforts to fight terrorism must not infringe upon Americans' civil liberties.
"If we pursue security to the point where we give up that which makes us Americans, the enemy has won," Mr. Gilmore said.
--------
Commission Opposes Terror Role for F.B.I.
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/politics/17PANE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 (AP) - To prevent the possibility of the F.B.I. becoming "a kind of secret police," a new agency should be created to gather intelligence on potential terrorist activities against the United States, a federal commission recommended today.
The panel, whose chairman is a former Virginia governor and Republican National Committee chairman, James S. Gilmore III, said the F.B.I. should not be allowed to gather intelligence on terrorism as it carried out its traditional law enforcement activities.
The commission, in a report, suggested establishing a National Center of Counter Terrorism that would be responsible for surveillance and intelligence-gathering and would include analysts now working for the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies.
The commission was created after the 1988 bombings of United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller III, said last week that he opposed a new intelligence agency focused on terrorism. The F.B.I. was "uniquely positioned" to do the job, Mr. Mueller said, because it could both detect the threat and arrest those involved.
--------
LAPD Chief proposes banning most police pursuits
12/17/2002
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-12-17-police-chase_x.htm
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The city Police Commission is considering a proposal to ban most police pursuits after a series of high-profile collisions.
The new policy would stop officers from chasing people for minor traffic violations such as missing license plates or broken taillights. The Police Commission has found that at least 60% of Los Angeles pursuits are for such minor offenses.
A commission study of police chases in several large cities found Los Angeles had more pursuits, collisions and injuries last year than Atlanta, Boston, Chicago or Philadelphia.
The plan also follows a number of chase-related accidents, including one this month in which a 3-week-old boy lost his left arm when a suspect crashed into the infant's vehicle.
"Some of these high-speed pursuits have resulted in harm and even death to innocent bystanders," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. "It's an ongoing problem and it's about time the Police Commission changed its policy."
Police Chief William Bratton suggested the change, which was to be considered Tuesday by the commission. The proposal also requires greater supervision of chases in progress.
Los Angeles had 781 police pursuits in 2001, up from 597 the previous year. More than 135 injuries resulted.
The chases also have been costly to the city. Liability claims resulting from police pursuits cost the city about $1.5 million from July 2000 to September 2002.
The department has proposed tracking fleeing suspects by air rather than the ground.
-------- courts
Albright To Testify At Hague Tribunal
By Abigail Levene
Reuters
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64497-2002Dec16?language=printer
THE HAGUE, Dec. 16 -- Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, will be the most senior U.S. official ever to testify at The Hague war crimes tribunal when she appears at a hearing Tuesday to set a sentence for the ex-Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic.
Albright, whose long-standing support for The Hague court has earned her the tag "mother of the tribunal," is to appear on the second day of a groundbreaking hearing for the woman once dubbed the "Iron Lady" of the Bosnian war.
The former Bosnian Serb president could face life in prison. She pleaded guilty in October to a count of crimes against humanity for the persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 conflict, in which 200,000 people disappeared or were killed.
Plavsic, the highest-ranking figure before the U.N. court to admit complicity in atrocities and the only woman publicly indicted in the tribunal's nine-year history, avoided trial after changing her plea to guilty on one charge of persecution. Her attorneys said the move was born of deep remorse.
Other charges against Plavsic, 72, including genocide, have been dropped.
Plavsic served as deputy to Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader who is one of the tribunal's most wanted men, then succeeded him.
The former science professor initially pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes after surrendering to the U.N. court in January 2001. She was on provisional release for months before returning to The Hague.
The three-day sentencing hearing, unprecedented at this tribunal in its scope and style, began today with witnesses including Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who testified for the prosecution by video link, and former Bosnian Serb prime minister Milorad Dodik, who testified for the defense.
A Muslim survivor of Serb-run detention camps, a war crimes investigator and a trauma counselor also testified.
Prosecutors showed harrowing footage of emaciated Bosnian Muslim inmates at a Serb-run detention camp in 1992 -- scenes that shocked the world and revived memories of the Nazi death camps where millions died in World War II.
Also scheduled to testify this week are the former U.N. envoy to the Balkans, Carl Bildt; Robert Frowlick, ex-mission chief in Bosnia of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; and Alex Boraine, a former South African legislator and leading light in his country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up to try to help heal wounds from the apartheid era.
Bildt and Frowlick will appear for the defense. Albright, secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, and Boraine are so-called common witnesses who prosecutors say will focus on Plavsic's guilty plea and on how it has helped establish the truth about Bosnian atrocities and promote reconciliation.
"It is only through the establishment of the truth that the unhealthy shackles of revisionism that debilitate the former Yugoslavia and that foster suspicion, ethnic hatred and civil unrest can be broken," said the prosecutor, Mark Harmon.
Plavsic plans to make a statement in court when witnesses have testified. A document released today said she admitted to having "embraced and supported the objective of ethnic separation by force and contributed to achieving it."
-------- immigration
THE TIGHTENING BORDER
Men From Muslim Nations Swamp Immigration Office
December 17, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER with SUSAN SACHS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/politics/17IMMI.html
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 16 - Lines began forming before dawn today outside the downtown federal building here as hundreds of men from five Muslim countries showed up to register with immigration authorities under a sweeping national dragnet designed to identify potential terrorists.
Attorney General John Ashcroft issued an order last month requiring virtually all male noncitizens over the age of 16 who come from 18 countries, mostly Arab and Muslim, to be interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted by federal authorities. The program affects tens of thousands of immigrants from those countries, most of whom hold valid work and study visas.
Those who fail to comply face criminal charges and immediate expulsion from the country.
The deadline for men from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan was today. Early this morning, the Los Angeles headquarters of the I.N.S. was ringed with hundreds of immigrants from those countries accompanied by anxious relatives and immigration lawyers. The hallway outside the interview room was jammed with scores of men from the five countries awaiting investigation. Similar scenes played out at immigration offices around the country.
Over the past week, agency officials enforcing the program have handcuffed and detained hundreds of men who showed up to be fingerprinted. In some cases the men had expired student or work visas; in other cases the men could not provide adequate documentation of their immigration status. At one point on Friday, officials in the Los Angeles office ran out of plastic handcuffs as they herded men into the basement lockup of the federal building, said Ali Bolour, an immigration lawyer who shepherded several clients through the process.
Advocates for immigrant rights said that the program had sent waves of fear through immigrant communities and that it was unlikely to make the country safer.
"This is part of a steady drumbeat of Department of Justice actions that have really put immigrants in the cross hairs," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group in Washington. "
All this is doing is making a bigger haystack, not finding more needles," Ms. Kelley said.
Immigration officials in Los Angeles declined to discuss the program, referring all calls to Washington. The Department of Justice official authorized to speak about it did not respond to repeated phone calls.
Jason Erb, government affairs director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the program had been poorly publicized and asked for an extension so people who were unaware of the requirement could voluntarily appear.
"The government has done little to spread the word in the Muslim and Arab-American communities about the requirement to register," Mr. Erb said. "This seems to be another in a series of dragnet policies that target law-abiding visitors. These policies are an ineffective and inefficient use of law enforcement."
The so-called special registration program is an expansion of an anti-terrorism directive issued this summer that subjects citizens of countries considered a high risk for terrorist activity to fingerprinting and additional scrutiny when they enter and leave the United States. The program requires those already in the United States to appear before immigration officers to provide detailed information about their locations, jobs, studies and visa statuses.
The Justice Department began calling in citizens of the first five countries last month. The list of countries was expanded on Nov. 6 to include Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Their deadline is Jan. 10.
Today, the Justice Department added Armenia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to the program, with a reporting deadline of Feb. 21.
The program does not apply to permanent residents, those who were granted or applied for asylum before Nov. 6, or diplomats and their dependents.
John Reed, an immigration lawyer and former State Department official, filed suit late last week seeking to halt detentions under the program. He compared the program with the roundups of Germans during World War I and the internment of the Japanese during World War II.
"It's outrageous," Mr. Reed said. "This is another example of the government overreacting to a threat."
Under the program, a foreign-born man from one of the selected countries appears before an I.N.S. clerk and is asked for his parents' names and addresses, the names and addresses of American contacts, his e-mail address and a form of identification other than his passport and immigration document.
He is also digitally photographed and fingerprinted, with both the picture and the prints run immediately against various criminal and immigration service databases. He is also asked how he arrived in the United States and when, as well as whether he has any connection to terrorist organizations.
Lawyers who have sat in on the proceedings said they found them chilling. "When you're in this room and everybody around you is a Middle Eastern man, it really sinks in," said Jacqueline Baronian, an immigration lawyer in New York. "It looks like people are being rounded up, and it's very, very disturbing."
Ms. Baronian and other lawyers said that if a man was found to be violating the terms of his visa, he was turned over to an investigation officer and detained. If the violation is minor, bond is set at $1,500 to $7,500, according to those who have been through the process.
One such man, who would not give his name because he said he was a member of a prominent Iranian Jewish family in Los Angeles, said he came to register last Tuesday and was immediately detained because his pending application for permanent residency had been held up in I.N.S. proceedings for five years.
The man, whose family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, is an Israeli citizen but came to the United States in 1997 to be reunited with his family.
He spent all of Tuesday in the federal building lockup in Los Angeles, where he said he saw dozens of men in similar circumstances. He then was taken by bus to a jail in Pasadena, where he spent the night. He was later taken to an detention center in Lancaster, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, where his father-in-law put up $1,500 bail to get him out on Thursday afternoon.
"This was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me," the man said. "I am very respected in the business community here and I was just trying to do the right thing, to help solve the problem this country has with terrorism."
He added: "We were treated like animals in Iran and all I want is for my kids to grow up and say they're proud to be Americans. But until the day I die, I'm going to be a foreigner in this country, because of the way I look and my accent."
-------- terrorism
French Thwart Possible Chemical Attack
December 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-Terror-Arrests.html
PARIS (AP) -- Four suspected Islamic militants who had an unidentified liquid and an anti-contamination suit were probably planning an attack, France's interior minister said Tuesday, and media reports linked the men to a terror suspect with alleged ties to al-Qaida.
French counterterrorism agents arrested the men -- three Algerians and a Moroccan -- in a raid on an apartment in a tough Paris suburb on Monday. Agents also seized $5,000 in cash, a computer and extremist Islamic documents, judicial officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said the raid also turned up false identity papers, two vials of an undetermined liquid and ``a protective military suit against biological, chemical and nuclear risks.'' Specialists were studying the vials' contents.
Sarkozy said the suspects were thought to have spent time in training camps in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and that they had been in contact with Rabah Kadre, who was arrested with two other suspects last month in Britain on terrorism-related charges.
Kadre, 35, is accused of possessing materials for the ``preparation, instigation or commission'' of terrorism. According to French news reports, he has links to the al-Qaida network and had been to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Sarkozy indicated the suspects were planning an attack, saying that ``with these four men, it was better to arrest them before rather than after.'' He did not elaborate.
The men were preparing a chemical attack, according to radio and television reports and the daily newspaper Le Parisien, which quoted unidentified police officials and agents from the counterintelligence service DST. Radio and television reports said the chemicals could be used to pollute public drinking water systems.
But judicial officials told The Associated Press that laboratory tests to determine the exact nature of the substances hadn't been completed. It was also unclear where, when or if the chemicals were to be used, they said.
The four suspects were taken into custody on suspicion of ``criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise'' under an investigation begun last month into the activities of groups from Chechnya, the daily Le Figaro reported.
France's top anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, ordered the arrests. He has broad powers to pursue suspects, search their homes, arrest, interrogate and charge them.
Bruguiere has recently stepped up the arrests amid mounting concerns in Europe that a terror attack may be imminent. More than 20 suspects have been taken into custody in five operations since Nov. 24. Eight remain in custody.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Brazil's new agriculture minister backs ethanol program
REUTERS BRAZIL:
December 17, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19100/newsDate/17-Dec-2002/story.htm
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Brazil's new agriculture minister Roberto Rodrigues on Monday expressed strong support for a relaunch of the national sugar cane-based fuel alcohol program.
"It's one of the biggest generators of jobs, a clean environment and an alternative source of energy," Rodrigues said in an interview on Globo television.
Rodrigues, 60, was appointed by president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday. Rodrigues is president of the Brazilian Association of Agribusiness and a sugar cane grower.
Rodrigues said Brazil had 90 million hectares (222 million acres) of spare arable land, without touching the Amazon, in addition to the 56 million ha (138 million acres) it currently cultivated.
"Brazil has an enormous area for it," he said.
Brazil's first Pro-Alcohol program, launched in the mid-1970s when oil prices were rocketing, collapsed at the end of the 1980s when supplies of fuel alcohol, also known as ethanol, dried up.
Fuel alcohol has returned to favor following a record cane crop, sharp rise in oil prices this year and development of new engine technologies to use ethanol.
-------- energy
Oil Prices Rise Rapidly
December 17, 2002
New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/business/worldbusiness/17OIL.html
Oil prices shot to their highest level in two months yesterday as traders grappled with the severity of reduced crude oil supplies caused by strikes in Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.
The price of crude oil for January delivery rose $1.66, to $30.10 a barrel, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, an increase of 5.8 percent.
It was the biggest single-day gain since January. Oil prices are now up more than 50 percent from those a year earlier.
The strikes in Venezuela have been led in large part by the managers and white-collar workers at the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela. Their walkout, which entered its seventh day yesterday, has brought the Venezuelan oil industry to a standstill, and exports have plummeted from about 2.7 million barrels a day to sporadic shipments of less than 500,000 barrels, estimated George Beranek, manager of market analysis at the Petroleum Finance Company, a Washington consulting group.
Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, accounting for 9 percent of its daily crude oil supply. Oil traders initially reacted with calm during the first 10 days or so of strikes and supply disruptions, convinced that the conflict between supporters and opponents of President Hugo Chávez would be resolved relatively quickly, as were strikes last spring. Instead, both sides have hardened their stances and the chances seem remote for a quick, peaceful resolution to the standoff that would start the oil flowing again, traders and industry analysts said.
"If both sides stick to their guns, it wouldn't be out of the question for the price of oil to get up to $35 by the end of the week," said John P. Kilduff, senior vice president for energy risk management at Fimat, the commodities trading arm of Société Générale. "This is significant for U.S. supplies in particular. Really bad, in fact."
Consumers may see the effect of the price increases as early as the end of this week or the beginning of the next, traders and industry analysts predicted.
Venezuela is a major exporter of gasoline to the United States, and last week, prices at New York Harbor, a wholesale pricing point, had begun to rise.
Moreover, a large refinery that supplies gasoline to the United States, the Hovensa plant in St. Croix, V.I., announced last week that it would reduce output because of shortfalls in Venezuelan crude oil.
The Venezuelan shutdown comes at a time when stockpiles of crude oil and petroleum products are already low compared with last year's levels, thanks in great part to the export cuts that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has made this year and to increased consumer demand.
Last week, OPEC, at a meeting in Vienna, said that its members would supply more crude oil to the market if the shutdown in Venezuela persisted. But traders and analysts pointed out that such a move would not immediately damp oil prices.
"OPEC has very small levels of excess production capacity outside the Persian Gulf," Mr. Beranek said, "and with the 40-plus days it takes for tankers to sail from there to here, it's not a source of short-term relief for the market."
Oil selling for $30 a barrel does not threaten a return to recession, economists said, but "it is certainly enough to forestall a more sustained recovery in the economy when the recovery is still very tepid," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a consulting firm in West Chester, Pa.
Prices at $35 to $40 a barrel are much more of a threat, economists said. While that may seem far-fetched now, continuing conflict in Venezuela could combine with war in Iraq to disturb oil supplies so profoundly that even OPEC would lack the spare production capacity to make up for shortfalls, industry experts warned.
"Generally, I wouldn't be concerned if it were just Venezuela," said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor's. "But combine that with what's happening in the Middle East, and if you're not nervous, you're not paying attention."
Murmurs are already rising in the oil markets that perhaps the Bush administration should consider releasing oil from the nation's 598-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve if the Venezuelan shutdown continues.
The Energy Department has already said it will allow oil companies that owe oil to the reserve in the near term to defer those deliveries until later in 2003 to keep more crude oil on the market.
"The S.P.R. is probably the only thing in the short-term that has so much oil so close by that it can get the oil into market quickly enough," Mr. Beranek said.
-------- environment
RUSSIAN ECOLOGISTS SLAM MOSCOW MAYOR'S PLAN TO DIVERT SIBERIAN RIVER TO CENTRAL ASIA
Associated Press
December 17, 2002
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/12/12172002/ap_49193.asp
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has revived a Soviet-era plan to divert the flow of a vast Siberian river to the drought-ridden former Soviet republics of Central Asia, provoking criticism Monday from Russian environmentalists. In a letter earlier this month to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Luzhkov proposed building a 2,550-kilometer (1,585-mile) canal to divert part of the Ob River to the southern Aral Sea region, Russian media reported.
----
ENVIRONMENTALISTS PROTEST ITALY FOR NOT TAKING BACK TOXIC WASTE FROM TURKEY
Associated Press
December 17, 2002
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/12/12172002/ap_49192.asp
Complaining that harmful oil, paint, and glue residues from Italy wound up on the Turkish coast, Greenpeace activists on Monday left three barrels containing what they said were toxic wastes in front of the Italian Embassy here. Member of the environmentalist group said the barrels were part of a batch of thousands containing the wastes shipped in 1987 from Italy to Romania. It said Romania didn't have facilities to dispose of the wastes and tossed them into the Black Sea. The waste later washed ashore in Turkey.
-------- human rights
'War on Terror' Infringing Human Rights, UNHCR Says
December 17, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-un-muslims.html
HELSINKI (Reuters) - The U.N.'s human rights chief said Tuesday that the U.S.-led ``war on terror'' was hurting human rights and exacerbating prejudices around the world.
``The war on terrorism has had some damaging effects, I would suggest, on human rights standards across the world,'' United Nations High Commissioner for Human rights Sergio Vieira de Mello told a news conference in Helsinki.
Governments across the globe have invoked the ``war on terror,'' announced by President Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, to justify activities that de Mello said are damaging human rights in the industrialized and developing worlds.
De Mello said he understood the need to provide security against attacks on civilians after the September 11 attacks which killed more than 3,000 people. But he said that the ``war on terror'' had aggravated existing prejudices.
On Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers seized four airliners, smashed two into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth crashed in a rural Pennsylvania field.
The U.N. human rights chief echoed the worries expressed by his predecessor Mary Robinson last month about the rise in discrimination against Muslims.
``Arabs and Muslims at large are experiencing increasing incidents of racial discrimination ... Singling out, finger pointing and ... even in some instances (violence),'' he said.
The United States blamed the September 11 attacks on Saudi born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. Several of the suspected hijackers were Saudis.
De Mello also said anti-Semitism was an issue that needed to be met head on.
He declined to predict if he believed there would be a war on Iraq, but said that the United Nations had learned its lesson from past conflicts and would be ready to act if a humanitarian crisis developed.
``We must at any cost prevent civilians from becoming what some irresponsible people call 'collateral damage','' he said. ``In Iraq...civilians have suffered enough.''
De Mello, speaking earlier at conference on racism and xenophobia, also said he would unveil a plan in 2003 for improving relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim world, warning that differences would lead to disaster. ``I intend to take an initiative in 2003 to improve understanding between the Muslim world and ourselves and open a new era,'' de Mello said. ``If we continue on this (current) path, we will end up in disaster.''
He did not comment further on the initiative, saying he was still consulting with governments.
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